Thinking Politics
Thinking Politics Perspectives in Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern Political Theory SECOND EDITION
Leslie Paul Thiele University of Florida
Seven Bridges Press 135 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010-7101 Copyright © 2002 by Chatham House Publishers of Seven Bridges Press, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.
Publisher: Ted Bolen Managing Editor: Katharine Miller Production Services: Sarah Evans Cover Design: Stefan Killen Design Printing and Binding: Victor Graphics, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thiele, Leslie Paul. Thinking Politics : perspectives in ancient, modern, and postmodern political theory / Leslie Paul Thiele.—2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-889119-51-2 (pbk.) 1. Political Science—Philosophy. 2. Postmodernism—Political aspects. I. Title. JA71 .T52 2002 320'.01—dc21 2001005710
Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the memory of my mother and father, Wilfrida Maria Thiele and Jacob Zachary Thiele
Contents Preface to the Second Edition Introduction 1.
Theory and Vision
ix xi 1
Setting Our Sights, 3 Parsimony, Accuracy, and Significance, 4 Scientific Theory, 7 The Interpretive Nature of Political Theory, 11 Hermeneutics and Intersubjectivity, 14 The Normative Nature of Theory, 18 Conceptual and Historical Analysis, 20 Suggested Readings, 25
2. The Question of Human Nature
26
The Political Significance of Human Nature, 29 The Genetic Leash, 34 Genes and Mores, 37 Biological and Cultural Reproduction, 40 Suggested Readings, 44
3. Politics, Power, and the Public Good
46
Power and Force, 49 The Nature of Political Power, 56 The Public Realm and the Private Realm, 59 Suggested Readings, 63
4. Modernity and Postmodernity Individualist Theories of Politics, 69 Structuralist Theories of Politics, 73 Poststructural and Postmodern Theories of Politics, 77 Identity and the Exercise of Power, 82 Social Power and Individual Freedom, 90 Theorizing at the Edge of Modernity, 95 Suggested Readings, 99
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5. Identity and Difference
100
Race, Religion, and Otherness, 104 The Other in America, 108 Limiting Power and Respecting Difference, 114
Gender and Identity, 118 The Historical Development of Feminism, 120 Gender Justice, 124 Equality and Difference, 131 Feminism, Liberalism, and Patriarchy, 136
The Politics of Class, 139 Alienation and Revolution, 141 Ideology, 144 History and Class Conflict, 145 Communism versus Socialism, 150
Suggested Readings, 153
6. Statecraft and Soulcraft
155
Politics and Philosophy in Ancient Greece, 155 Reason in the Soul and in the State, 157 The Politics of Unity and Plurality, 160
The Life of Liberty, 163 Positive and Negative Liberty, 166 The Excesses and Deficiencies of Freedom, 171 Mastery and Liberty, 178
The Life of Reason, 181 Economic Reason, 185 Political Reason, 190 Ecological Reason, 195
The Balance of Justice, 200 The Primacy of Justice, 201 The Limits of Justice, 205 Giving to Each What Is Due, 208
Suggested Readings, 215
7.
Ideology and Irony
216
The Nature of Ideology, 221 The Nature of Irony, 226 Between Ideology and Irony, 232 The Power of Words, 235 Suggested Readings, 238
Conclusion Notes Index About the Author
240 245 263 271
Preface to the Second Edition originally conceived as a standard introduction to political theory. Demonstrating the continuity and change within the long and venerable tradition of political thought was a pleasant prospect. I quickly discovered, however, that I was not well suited to the task of writing a stock survey text with its inherent simplifications and generalizations. I could not bring myself to strip from political theory its most redeeming qualities, namely, its capacity to stretch the mind, induce critical inquiry, and bring worldly problems to bear—often in a disquieting way—on the aspiring theorist. The result is a book that, I hope, will intellectually, practically, and personally challenge its readers. It should stimulate at least as many questions as it provides answers. This, I believe, is the best means to cultivate a love for the discipline. The chapters of this book integrate the insights of ancient, modern, and postmodern political thought. A large and growing literature addresses each of these areas of political theory, so, at the end of each chapter I offer suggestions for further reading. Many of these works, particularly the classic texts, are available in more than one satisfactory edition; I have therefore abbreviated bibliographical information. Most of the suggested readings are also found in the endnotes, where readers can identify the editions that I have used. The endnotes themselves are wholly bibliographical and need not be consulted unless references for citations are desired. The second edition of Thinking Politics retains the general format and structure of the first, but I have added and updated material and made other substantive and stylistic changes throughout the text. The intent was to make the book more accessible to those who have had little opportunity to study political theory, without, in the process, doing a disservice to the complexities of the field. The second edition also contains a new section on justice in chapter 6. Although I had hoped to devote an entire section to justice in the first edition, at that time I had not been able to organize my thinking about the subject in a way that usefully integrated ancient, modern, and postmodern perspectives. In this sense, Thinking Politics continues to be a work in progress—and as with most literary projects, the task of writing is never truly completed; it is simply abandoned.
THIS BOOK WAS
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For making this book’s arguments more compelling and its writing more readable, I would like to thank Jeff Corey, Al Damico, Luke Garrott, George Graham, Albert Matheny, Hillard Pouncy, and Donna Waller. Special thanks are due to Paul Wapner, Ted Schatzki, and Susan Thiele. Paul has engaged me, over many years of friendship and travel, in a critical dialogue about the integration of philosophic concerns and political life. Without that dialogue, this book, and my life, would be much poorer. Ted’s critical commentary on the penultimate draft of this manuscript was so reassuringly thorough that I am tempted, contrary to tradition, to make him responsible for any confusions and oversights that remain. Susan provided much critical insight and a perspicacious editing of the entire manuscript. She also gave unflagging encouragement and abiding support. I would like to thank, as well, readers of the first edition who communicated to me their impressions. In particular, I wish to note my appreciation of the critical commentary offered by the graduate students in my Politics and Theory seminar. I would be very pleased to receive more comments, and for this purpose I can be reached at the Department of Political Science, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611-7325, or by e-mail at
[email protected].
Introduction POLITICAL THEORY IS deliberation about the proper organization of collective human existence. It is concerned with understanding political life as it is defined by the public use of power. This investigation of things political has traditionally been understood as an inquiry into the nature of “the good life.” Since ancient times, the good life has been characterized as a life of reason, shared with others in liberty and
grounded in justice. Political theorists describe the components of this life, speculate on its requirements, evaluate its potential, and argue for its achievement. The tradition of political theory, while rich in historical insight, conceptual refinement, ethical debate, and philosophic reflection, is poor in eternal truths and practical implementations. It follows that the art and craft of political theory is less a learning of set principles, technical procedures, or concrete applications than an exercise in critical thought. To teach political theory is to introduce students to a tradition of thought so that they may interact creatively with it. To teach political theory is to aid in the acquisition and development of the analytic and interpretive skills, the moral and philosophic judgment, and the social and historical knowledge needed to appreciate a tradition of thought, to contest its claims, and to make good use of its insights. Developing this skill, judgment, and knowledge is an exciting but arduous task. Returns on investments of time and effort are seldom certain. This is partly because political theory has always been, and remains today, a field uncertain of its mandate, unsettled in its procedures, and self-consciously critical of its own identity. Political theory might be described as an unending dance staged between skeptical reserve and the epic effort to achieve methodological rigor, conceptual stability, and moral certainty about things political. Thinking Politics introduces the reader to this form of dance. Only that which has no history is truly definable. Historical phenomena may be described in detail, but their meanings cannot be affixed once and for all. The discussion of political theory in this book occasionally takes on the pretense of being definitive. Yet political theory is a historical product. Its multiple origins and ongoing evolution make it available for rich description but not conclusive definition. As in times past, political theory today means different things
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to different people in different circumstances. Consequently, there is no single definition of political theory to be found in this book. Instead, the multifaceted nature of the discipline is explored. The history of political theory is often circumscribed within a canon of thinkers that originates in antiquity and proceeds through medieval and modern periods to contemporary times. This roster of theorists is assumed to constitute a distinctive, self-contained tradition of political thought. Yet the canon is largely a retrospective construction. Most of its representative figures did not identify themselves as contributors to a single tradition. Nonetheless, the voices that animate the history of political theory have produced a sustained, if unruly, conversation over the ages. It is a conversation well worth entering. As described in the following pages, this conversation bears a certain uniformity of accent. The book seldom ventures beyond Western political thought. Despite its focus on the politics of identity and difference, non-Western identities receive little attention. Undoubtedly, this is a limitation. It is explicable, if not excusable, owing to the author’s own restricted exposure to other traditions of political thought. Future editions of Thinking Politics will expand upon this culturally parochial foundation. This book sets out the scope and methods of political theory, understood as a tradition of historical, normative, interpretive, and analytical thought whose concern, most broadly speaking, is the nature of collective human life. The aim of this text is not encyclopedic. Rather than provide a survey of the discipline and its major figures, it approaches the tradition from various points of view in an effort to engage readers in thinking politics. This unusual term requires an explanation. The project of thinking politics means three things. It means, first, thinking about politics as this phrase is commonly employed. To think about politics is to think about the means and ends of political life. It entails exploring the nature and charting the limits of politics. Thinking about politics is primarily an analytical and historical enterprise. Thinking politics also means thinking through politics. To think through politics is to acknowledge that one’s own attitudes, beliefs, and values are themselves products of a political life. To think through politics is, self-consciously, to think through the medium of one’s participation in a collective existence with its inherent commitments and biases. Thinking through politics, then, is a consideration of the various political forces that stimulate and constrain thought and action in greater and lesser degrees. This is largely a self-reflective and interpretive project. Finally, thinking politics means thinking politically. To think politically is to think explicitly about one’s opinions and behavior in reference to common standards, rights, and responsibilities. To think politically is to think as a member of political society, rather than as a particular individual with particular
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interests. It requires that one step into the shoes of others, moving beyond the question of what is desirable for oneself an individual to ponder what people can and should do together. It demands one’s judgment as a citizen among citizens. The task of thinking politically is normative and critical in nature. Political theorists and political theory texts often give pride of place to one of these three projects: the analytical and historical, the self-reflective and interpretive, or the normative and critical. Yet these three aspects of thinking politics remain inextricably entwined within the tradition of political thought. Thinking politics integrates these three fundamental features of political thought and life. The presumption is that they are best exercised together. This text distinguishes itself from standard introductions to political theory in important ways. First, many introductory works offer historical or conceptual overviews of the tradition. They supply glosses on an extensive roster of figures and political ideas. Such glosses are informative. In painting the theoretical canvas with such broad strokes, however, few lasting impressions are made. The reader receives a smattering of information about a canon of figures, texts, and concepts for which he or she gains little appreciation. Often the reader ends up with a laundry list of definitions that are routinely memorized only to be soon forgotten. Such survey texts court the danger of undercutting what arguably should be their most important service: prompting the reader to engage in critical political thought. Rather than reproduce such efforts, this text explores the art and craft of political theory. To this end, the nature of politics and the nature of theory are discussed extensively. What it means to theorize, and to theorize well, is a central focus. The aim is to develop both an understanding of the domain of politics and a sensibility to the ways in which this domain may be intellectually and morally engaged. The text relies on the exemplary fashion in which certain theorists within the history of political thought have constructed and evaluated the domain of politics. These references to canonical figures are meant less to celebrate past achievements or invoke authorities than to stimulate and guide the reader’s own political thinking. While standard definitions of key political concepts are provided, these definitions are also frequently challenged. In turn, more original and controversial perspectives are explored. The aim is to encourage the reader not only to learn about political theory but to learn how to think theoretically about politics. This goal is best pursued by exploring how various political quandaries have been intellectually and morally approached and reapproached over time, and by underlining the reader’s opportunity and responsibility creatively to work through such quandaries. The second distinguishing characteristic of this text is its integration of contemporary theoretical and political concerns. Clifford Geertz, an American anthropologist, observed a blurring of genres in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades.1 Since ancient times, political theory has crossed paths
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with philosophy. Today, however, it also borrows from and lends to such fields as anthropology, biology, ecology, economics, history, literary criticism, psychology, and sociology. This ongoing cross-fertilization has stimulated a renaissance in political theory. It has also challenged the stability and identity of the discipline. With this in mind, the text integrates these kindred disciplines into discussion. The book is also significantly informed by postmodern concerns. Introductory texts in political theory tend to traverse the tradition in retrospect. Historical overview has much to recommend it and is an indispensable component of political theory. But students also need to be grounded in the present and to cast a glance to the future. To study political theory today and ignore postmodern thought is to neglect one of its more creative forces. Yet students can find few manageable introductions to postmodern thought that successfully integrate it with the tradition of political theory. Hence an important contemporary trend has remained unproductively isolated and obscure. Most contemporary political theorists think of themselves as standing at the edge of modernity or perhaps straddling the modern and the postmodern. While postmodern theory occupies a territory different from ancient and modern theory, the border between them follows a zigzag course over the rough terrain of politics. Occasionally, with particular thinkers or issues, this border slips from sight altogether and an uneasy convergence takes place. Determining if and how the border between the ancient, modern, and postmodern should be drawn is a demanding task. This text demonstrates that border crossings can make for good theory. Instead of characterizing postmodernism as superseding its forerunners, Thinking Politics encourages the simultaneous exploration of ancient, modern, and postmodern perspectives. It integrates the postmodern focus on the social construction of identity with the modern concern for the regulation of social interaction and the ancient preoccupation with the cultivation of virtue and the formation of character. In this way, postmodern thought is made theoretically accessible and politically relevant. The book is divided into seven chapters, each of which approaches the task of understanding political life from a different point of view. Chapter 1, “Theory and Vision,” explores the nature of theory. The chapter suggests that theories are best understood as conceptual lenses that furnish focused visions of the world. It discusses similarities and differences between interpretive political theory and scientific theory. In turn, the chapter examines the normative nature of political theory as well as its methods of historical and conceptual analysis. Chapter 2, “The Question of Human Nature,” argues that human beings are unique because they are political animals and that the question of human nature must be broached before the question of politics can be adequately addressed. Many of the greatest achievements in the tradition of political
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thought are grounded on specific theories of human nature. With these exemplars in mind, current knowledge of human biology and genetics is brought to bear on political concerns and theoretical aspirations. Chapter 3, “Politics, Power, and the Public Good,” explores the meaning of politics. It defines politics as the public use of power. An extensive investigation of the means and ends of power allows it to be distinguished from force. In turn, the chapter explores the ambiguous boundaries of public life. Because politics is pervasive, it becomes necessary to distinguish between actions, events, and institutions that are more and less political in nature. Chapter 4, “Modernity and Postmodernity,” approaches postmodern understandings of politics by way of their modern predecessors. The chapter begins with a historical analysis of modernism and proceeds with an overview of structuralist, poststructuralist, and postmodern thought. It subsequently juxtaposes the modern concern with governmental regulation of social interaction and allocation of scarce resources to the postmodern concern with the social construction of individual and collective identities. The chapter highlights the political nature of postmodern theory by contrasting it to modern behaviorism. Chapter 5, “Identity and Difference,” examines various ways in which individual and collective identities are forged and contested. It investigates the political significance of racial, religious, gender, and economic identities. In each case, the text prompts the reader to explore whether, how, and to what extent his or her own identity is a social construct and how identities thus constructed respond and relate to difference. Chapter 6, “Statecraft and Soulcraft,” begins by exploring the linkage between postmodern concerns and the issues that animate classical theory. It compares the ancient Greek effort to craft virtuous souls through education and legislation with the postmodern focus on the social construction of identity. It links the relationship between statecraft and soulcraft, politics and identity, to the valorization of key political concepts in the tradition of political theory, such as liberty, reason, and justice. Chapter 7, “Ideology and Irony,” examines the history of ideology from the coining of the word in the eighteenth century through the reported “end of ideology” in our times. The chapter introduces irony, a kind of skeptical reserve, as a counteracting force to ideology. Political theories avail themselves of both ironic and ideological lenses. These lenses respectively expand and contract the theorist’s breadth of vision and impetus for action. The chapter encourages readers to weigh the merits and shortcomings of both ideological and ironic lenses, to identify their uses within the history of political thought, and to explore the nature of an appropriate balance.
chapter 1
Theory and Vision IN SUBSEQUENT CHAPTERS we investigate the nature of politics and political life. Before doing so, however, it is useful to explore our proposed method of investigation. That is to say, we first need to explore the nature of theory itself and the various ways of theorizing. The best way to conceive of theory is to think of it as a kind of lens. We all have lenses in our eyes that focus light on our retinas. Many people also wear optical lenses made of glass or plastic to correct poor vision. These artificial, external lenses aid the eye in focusing light so that it produces clear images, rather than blurs and blotches. Microscopes and telescopes are also constructed from optical lenses. These magnifying lenses bend light in particular ways, allowing a focused image of very small or very distant objects. Theories help us put the world in focus. What optical lenses do for our vision, theories do for our understanding. Whereas optical lenses improve our sight, theories improve our insight. Theories are conceptual lenses. They help us produce clearly focused mental views. We might define a theory as a cognitive scheme or conceptual system that brings a part of the world into clearer focus and allows it to be better understood. Most of us can see the world quite well without the artificial lenses found in telescopes, microscopes, or even eyeglasses. Our unaided vision suffices. Likewise, most of us can get along quite well without engaging in formal theorizing. Our unaided intellect, common sense, and traditional cultural viewpoints prove adequate. Nevertheless, like the lenses we make out of glass or plastic to see more clearly, the theories we fashion out of concepts allow us to understand the world more thoroughly and profoundly. They provide alternative viewpoints to those filtered through our personal or cultural predispositions. They also provide magnified views of particular features of our world that otherwise would go unnoticed. By allowing us greater insight, theories take us beyond superficial overviews. Instead of merely describing what we see from customary viewpoints with the unaided intellect, theories allow us to get beneath the surface. Theories allow
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radical insight. The word radical derives from the Latin word for “root.” Theories dig beneath the surface. They give us access to the roots of our concerns. We could certainly survive without the intricate conceptual schemes that constitute theories. But we would have to give up much that we have come to take for granted. Science would end, as would philosophy. Our cultural life would become greatly impoverished. Many of our most practical affairs, such as agriculture and education, would cease to develop or would revert to quite primitive levels. A world without theory would be very different from the world we now inhabit. To be sure, theorizing also has its darker side. Theories of Aryan supremacy helped Adolf Hitler pitch Germany into a murderous war. Albert Einstein’s brilliant theories of particle physics eventually led to the development of thermonuclear bombs. A complex combination of economic, scientific, and social theories have aided in the unrestrained growth of industry and population that gravely threatens our environment. Still, the greatness of humankind has evolved largely out of the power of the human mind, and the engines of theory generated much of this power. Quite likely, some very basic form of theorizing occurs whenever humans focus their attention on particular parts of the world or come to perceive the world in particular ways. When we look up into the night sky and ponder the stars—whether they are assumed to manifest the hand of God or are appreciated solely for their aesthetic qualities, whether they are perceived as astrological signs dictating our fates, as distant suns burning atomic fuel, or as navigational tools guiding our earthly travels—each of these perceptions has been structured by some cognitive scheme or conceptual system. These schemes and systems all evidence theoretical insight. The French thinker Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was perhaps the first modern social scientist to insist that “no real observation of any kind of phenomenon is possible, except in as far as it is first directed, and finally interpreted, by some theory.”1 Theory, in one form or other, channels most if not all of our perceptions, attitudes, opinions, values, judgments, and actions. Theories do not simply chart reality; they aid us in constructing it. To say that our most basic perceptions are directed and interpreted by theory is not to suggest that there is no reality out there apart from our theoretical constructions of it. Indeed, the problem we face as theorists is not an absence of facts about our world but an overabundance of them. Theories are the conceptual lenses we use to sort through the plethora of facts that confront us each day. Theories organize the multiple facets of reality into a comprehensible order. Without theories of a very rudimentary kind, we would not be able to tell which bits of reality are important and which are insignificant or how some facts cor-
theory and vision
3
respond to others. Indeed, without theories we might not even be able to identify something as a fact at all. Setting Our Sights No lens can bring everything into focus all at once. As anyone who has worked with optical lenses knows, bringing particular things into clear view means that other things lying closer or farther away necessarily remain out of focus. The same principle holds for images formed by our eyes. After gazing for a time upon some distant object, quickly glance back at the pages of this book. A moment of blurry vision occurs. The lenses in one’s eyes then rapidly change their shape to make the written words legible. Photographers exchange one lens for another or alter the distance between lenses to produce clear images. Our eyes simply change the shape of their lenses. The results are the same. Specific lenses, or specific shapes of lenses, allow us to focus on certain things at certain distances. The rest of the world is necessarily left in a haze. Theoretical lenses likewise either limit the depth of our vision in order to highlight the foreground or neglect close-up views in order to capture the background. By focusing our attention on particular clumps of reality, theories cause us to ignore other clumps that lie nearer or farther away. An economic theory that seeks to explain present levels of unemployment may, for instance, focus expansively on the history of industrial cycles over many decades. To do so, however, it would have to sacrifice an in-depth psychological investigation of a reputed breakdown of the work ethic in recent years. Likewise, a biological theory might suggest the inevitability of war based on the effects of human hormones that induce aggression. To do so, however, it would ignore arguments for the potential eradication of collective violence through the cultivation of religious faith. By organizing ideas, principles, and facts into systematic, conceptual accounts and explanations, theories give us insight into a part of the world that otherwise would remain too complex and too chaotic to comprehend. But in producing this focused image, theories necessarily leave much out of the picture. Lenses bend light to create focused images. But not all available light is used. The apertures of cameras and the irises perforated by the pupils in our eyes serve the purpose of restricting the amount of light that passes through the lens. Too much light leads to overexposure, with much detail lost in the glare. Too little light leads to underexposure, with much detail lost in the gloom. Hence our eyes temporarily fail us when we walk into a dark theater from a well-lit lobby and again when we walk out of a matinee performance into the brilliant afternoon sunshine. We can be blinded not only by darkness but also by light. Theories have analogous characteristics. Theories work well only when they effectively regulate the amount of information we receive and the conceptual
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networks we form. Too little data or a dearth of conceptual linkages lead to dim, underexposed, and impoverished images of the world. Without sufficient information, we have no foundation on which to build knowledge. This relationship is generally well understood. Yet too much data and a glut of conceptual linkages are no better. They produce confusing, overexposed images of the world. We are confronted with a busy hodgepodge of phenomena that is difficult to decipher. We face the proverbial problem of not being able to see the forest for the trees. To produce a clear image, shadows are as necessary as well-lit surfaces. The attempt to shed light on everything leaves nothing distinctly revealed. If theories are to yield good vision, certain things must remain in the dark. Conceptual lenses, like optical lenses, influence not only the kinds of images we perceive but also the manner in which our observation takes place. Like all tools, theories demand, or at least suggest, specific targets and specific methods of use. Those armed with telescopes have to work on cloudless nights. Those armed with microscopes generally work indoors. The tools of their trade make the former lens users unlikely to examine bacteria and the latter unlikely to chart planetary motion. Our conceptual lenses also influence what we see and how we see it. They provide a framework for our investigations of the world. In political science, statistical analysis of survey data provides us with a kind of telescopic lens that may be used to furnish an overview of the body politic. In-depth psychological analysis, in contrast, provides us with a microscopic lens that reveals the intricate inner workings of individual political actors. Statistical and psychological theories supply their own methodologies (methods of use) that influence where and how we look for political knowledge. A person skilled at survey statistics is generally convinced of the importance of aggregated opinions and behaviors. Political knowledge is produced through the analysis of the variance and correlation of these opinions and behaviors within large populations and is relayed in terms of descriptive and inferential statistics. A person skilled at psychological analysis highlights the importance of individual desires or unconscious drives. Political knowledge is produced through the analysis of life histories and personality characteristics and is relayed in terms of psychological categories and tendencies. In selecting our methodology, then, we are implicitly if not explicitly suggesting which things are and which things are not significant objects of knowledge. It is said that the person whose only tool is a hammer confronts every problem as if it were a nail. For this reason, methodologies may be seen as ways of “shaping the mind.”2 It repays us to be conscious and critical of how our chosen methods shape our perceptions and theories no less than how our perceptions and theories shape our choice of methods. Parsimony, Accuracy, and Significance How does one choose the correct aperture for conceptual lenses, finding the middle ground between underexposed and overexposed images? How does one
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choose the correct shape for these lenses, determining which images will come into focus and which will remain obscure? Finally, how does one determine the direction in which to point one’s conceptual lenses? In short, what makes for good theorizing? The answer to these important questions is straightforward: it all depends on what one wants to accomplish. Like photographers, theorists choose different lenses to do different jobs. There are no hard and fast rules. Still, we may make general statements about the features of a good theory. Three theoretical virtues are widely recognized. The first theoretical virtue is parsimony. To be parsimonious is to be sparing or even stingy. Parsimony means frugality. To be theoretically parsimonious is to forgo all unnecessary speculation and detail. Theories must be condensed enough to offer an advantage over an extended, unsystematic description of the world. Simplicity is crucial. A good theorist is thrifty in employing concepts and outlining relationships. Interpretations, descriptions, explanations, or predictions must not be cluttered with unnecessary facts or assumptions. Theorizing, in this sense, is like mapmaking. Maps offer us condensed outlines. The more details included in these outlines, the more accurately they represent the actual geography. But theories should not represent reality in too much detail. If we create a map that contains all the recognizable features of a territory, it will approximate the size of the land that it charts. Lewis Carroll, the whimsical author of Alice in Wonderland, once told of a map of the German countryside that had a scale of one to one. It was, of course, a wonderfully detailed representation. But it could not be used because when unfolded it covered all the crops. Theories should not be so cumbersome that they cannot fruitfully be employed. Good maps have clear legends or explanatory captions. They maintain the same scale throughout and do not randomly change their format. Likewise, to remain parsimonious, a theory must be relatively uniform in its structure. Parsimonious theories are consistent; their rules tolerate few, if any, exceptions. They are straightforward to grasp and easy to use. Parsimonious theories leave relatively few phenomena within their jurisdiction without an interpretation, description, explanation, or prediction. The chunk of the world they portray does not contain large areas of unexplored territory. The pursuit of simplicity goes too far, however, if it makes a theory simplistic. Parsimony must not sacrifice too much detail. To ensure that reality is sufficiently represented, theorists claim accuracy as their second key virtue. If the map we create is overly reduced in size, if it is simplified to the point where crucial details are lost, then it will fail to aid us in finding our way about. A map of a country that reveals mountain ranges and major bodies of water but leaves out all highways and thoroughfares may be wonderfully compact, but it will not help us find our way from city to city. Theories must be sufficiently detailed to allow for accurate assessments or explanations of the world.
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If a theory is both sufficiently parsimonious and sufficiently accurate, we say that it is elegant. An elegant theory concisely and precisely interprets, describes, explains, or predicts some aspect of the world. An elegant theory simplifies reality enough to make it comprehensible but remains accurate enough in its representations to avoid unnecessary ambiguity. The particular balance struck between parsimony and accuracy will, of course, vary according to the circumstances. Generally speaking, the more complex the reality one seeks to understand, the more complex the theory needed to capture it, the less parsimonious that theory will be. The third virtue for which theorists strive is significance. To be significant, a theory must be of interest. Significant theories illuminate an important part of the world. If we create maps of places no one ever visits, wants to visit, or ever will visit, we theorize in vain. However parsimonious and accurate our theories are, if they fail to offer significant insights, they fail to be good theories. We must point our theoretical lenses at interesting and important things; otherwise there is not much point in looking through them. There are, generally speaking, two threats to significance. The first is tautology. To say that all bachelors are unmarried is to speak tautologically. It is simply to state a definition. Likewise, a theory becomes tautological when it offers nothing more than a reiteration of accepted terms. A reworded definition, rather than a process of reasoning, speculation, or experimentation, does all the important work. A theory that boils down to the prediction that all political science majors will, at some point during their college careers, enroll in political science classes is tautological. By “political science major” we indicate a student taking courses in political science. This theory does not interpret, describe, explain, or predict. It simply (re)defines. Tautological theories are nonfalsifiable. That is to say, no evidence could be presented that would repudiate their claims. No gathering of new facts, no elucidation of principles or ideas, and no subsequent reasoning can undermine a tautological theory. A tautological theory may provide a set of useful definitions that simply and accurately label features of our world. Like any good set of definitions, tautological theories may provide conceptual clarity, and this is no small accomplishment. The reasoning that holds the components of a tautological theory together, however, is completely circular and self-enclosed. Because its definitions do not challenge or reorganize our common ways of understanding the world, because it does not reinterpret the world in an original way, a tautological theory amounts to little more than a list of related entries in a dictionary. To avoid tautology, a set of propositions and arguments must make itself vulnerable to refutation or falsification.3 Good theories must be open to challenge, either from argument or from evidence. One should be able to construct or at least imagine an argument or empirical test that would disconfirm every
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theory worthy of its name. A theory that produces the assertion that the moon is made of green cheese, for example, is open to refutation. We could disconfirm it by gathering empirical evidence. We might employ telescopic spectral analysis or bring back bits of the moon for chemical analysis. Even before the existence of spectrometers and space travel, however, the kind of evidence needed to falsify such a theory was imaginable. Far from constituting a shortcoming, being susceptible to refutation or falsification is a prerequisite for good theory. If a theory is not susceptible to contestation by reasoned argument, gathered evidence, or repeated experimentation, then it is not so much a theory as a dogma, which is to say, an article of faith wrapped up in a circular series of definitions. Indeed, theories are never really proven. They are simply reconfirmed by way of overcoming every attempt that is made to refute them. The second threat to significance occurs if our theory becomes trite. Something is trite when it is commonplace or self-evident. Trite propositions or theories fail to interest us because they state the obvious. To suggest that every student, regardless of race or gender, will take a breath within the first few minutes of a lecture is to say something completely trite. Because the statement could be falsified by a very determined breath-holder, it is not tautologous. But we do not need a sophisticated theory to make such a banal statement. Simple observation and common sense tells us as much. To avoid triteness, theories must contribute to the task of better understanding a complex world. These theoretical illuminations need not be overly intricate or obscure. Nonetheless, they must be enlightening. Scientific Theory The virtues of parsimony, accuracy, and significance are elements of any good argument and hence are useful in describing the elements of all theories. They are, however, most appropriately identified as virtues of scientific theories. Scientific theories describe the laws or regularities that account for the behavior of things. Originally, the word science, from the Latin scientia, simply meant knowledge. Eventually, science came to mean knowledge of a certain sort, namely, a body of related physical laws combined with trusted methods for obtaining and testing such laws. These laws pertain to the regular, recurrent, and ideally invariant associations between and among events and things within the natural world. The natural sciences often serve as a paradigm for scientific theory. Natural scientific theories explain the way things behave with such parsimony and accuracy that prediction about the way they will behave in the future becomes possible. A scientific theory constitutes a set of hypotheses with predictive force. Certain sciences, such as geology and evolutionary biology, both predict future
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events and explain what has happened in the distant past. These theories may eventually come to be confirmed or disconfirmed by subsequent discoveries of geological formations or fossils. Explanations and predictions always stand in need of confirmation. The typical method of confirmation in the natural sciences is the methodologically rigorous replication of the experimental process. This entails very precise forms of measurement. If, for instance, I can explain the amount of a particular substance produced when specific amounts of two other chemicals are mixed together at certain temperatures, then I should be able to predict that this same reaction will reoccur and produce the same results given the same mixture of chemicals at the same temperature. In turn, someone else should be able to verify my results, thus validating my theory’s explanations and predictions, by repeating the same experiment with the same methodological rigor. Certain social sciences (also known as behavioral sciences), including some areas of political science, strive after this level of parsimony, accuracy, and methodological rigor. They aim to duplicate in the study of culture what has been achieved in the study of nature. Often employing statistical methods of analysis, behavioral social sciences quantitatively investigate the attitudes and actions of individuals and social groups. Their theories attempt to predict and explain human behavior. These empirical theories are testable through repeated observation and precise measurement if not repeated experimentation. The term social science first came into use during the French Revolution, as intellectuals attempted to ground the political changes sweeping France on scientific principles. One of the most prominent advocates of the scientization of politics was the French social philosopher Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), who wrote: Hitherto, the method of the sciences of observation has not been introduced into political questions; every man has imported his point of view, method of reasoning and judging, and hence there is not yet any precision in the answers, or universality in the results. The time has come when this infancy of the science should cease, and certainly it is desirable it should cease, for the troubles of the social order arise from the obscurities in political theory.4 Likewise, the English political theorist and philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73) wrote in his System of Logic that “the backward state of the moral sciences can only be remedied by applying to them the methods of physical science, duly extended and generalized.”5 Saint-Simon’s and Mill’s vision is shared by certain social scientists today who believe that “we are in the political sciences where the natural sciences were two hundred years ago.” The task at hand is to “apply scientific methods to the management of society as we have been learn-
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ing to apply them in the natural world.”6 Most social scientists admit that they will never attain the explanatory or predictive power currently enjoyed by natural scientists. Nonetheless, many social scientists mimic the methods of natural science as closely as possible in an effort to achieve greater explanatory and predictive power. Do we have any reason to believe that social science will ever produce laws that have the predictive and explanatory power of, say, the laws of physics or chemistry? Attempts have certainly been made. While these attempts have all fallen short of the mark, their achievements have not been negligible. The political sociologist Robert Michels (1876–1936), for instance, developed the famous “iron law of oligarchy” after studying political parties in Europe at the turn of the century. Oligarchy means rule by the few. The iron law of oligarchy states that “an essential characteristic” of all human collectivities is a hierarchical structure wherein a minority exercises most of the power and effectively rules over a majority. Michels maintains that all human organizations bear this characteristic. He writes: “It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy.”7 Michels’s law, like scientific law, is predictive and testable. Given the formation of an organization (and particularly the formation of a political party), we may predict the formation of an oligarchy. We may then test, by way of observation, whether an oligarchy indeed exists in any given organization. Like most “laws” of social science, however, Michels’s iron law of oligarchy is not very precise. The law supplies us with no way of knowing, or even guessing, how soon an oligarchy will form, how strong an oligarchy will become once it forms, how long it will last, or how and why it will decrease in strength, dissipate, or change form. Unlike, say, Isaac Newton’s law of physics, which states that force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration (F = ma), the iron law of oligarchy is not a precise equation. Unlike Newton’s law, which allows for quite exact measurements, calculations, and predictions, Michels’s law can yield only very general statements about the way the social world works. Moreover, Michels’s law does not apply equally to all organizations. Small organizations whose members have close, friendly relations are frequent exceptions. One reason why social science falls short of achieving the parsimony, accuracy, and predictive power of natural science is that the methods of scientific theory are not easily adapted to social and political concerns. Outside the laboratory, too many uncontrolled and unforeseen forces affect social and political life to allow for precise measurement. Yet the observation and analysis of political society cannot be done in controlled laboratory conditions. In the social sciences, experimentation, let alone repeated experimentation, is very difficult if not impossible to arrange. Often experimentation would be morally
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unacceptable even if it could be arranged. We might adequately observe the reaction of a democratic people to a coup d’état and subsequently develop a theory to account for such behavior. Yet it would be ethically unacceptable to stage a second coup d’état under similar circumstances in order to verify our results. Social and political practices, therefore, are seldom if ever replicable. Comparative studies between different people, different countries, or the same country at different times can be very enlightening. But they fail to duplicate the precise experimental conditions of the natural sciences. Humans learn from history and from each other. Hence repeated observations of social reality are not observations of exactly the same reality. The actors involved have in all likelihood thought about themselves and their world in the meantime and have developed or otherwise changed their behavior or conditions as a result. Experimental observation allows for the construction of scientific theory because the objects of study, being either biological or mechanical, operate in relatively fixed patterns and display regularities according to ascertainable physical laws. For the political theorist, in contrast, the objects of study are selfconscious agents, that is, thinking human beings who reflect on themselves, their worldly conditions, and their actions. This self-reflexivity makes human behavior far more irregular and unpredictable than the behavior of other forms of life or of inorganic forms of matter. Self-reflection changes how we understand ourselves and our world and hence how we act in the world. While social scientific theories may systematically chart human behavior, therefore, they seldom, if ever, fully explain or predict it. Their subject matter is simply too complex, variable, and self-reflective. Human actors may even change their behavior in light of a social scientific theory. This behavioral change, in turn, may invalidate the original theory’s explanations or predictions. Given these difficulties, some argue that social scientists should not attempt to mimic the natural sciences but should instead develop their own standards and procedures. The German economist and sociologist Max Weber (1864– 1920) maintained that social scientists should not search for laws that determine and predict human behavior. Rather, they should seek to describe historical correlations and tendencies. Weber argued that the mandate of social science is to understand human behavior profoundly, not to predict it precisely.8 Human history, Weber maintained, is best described as a concurrence of events, not a system of ascertainable laws. In coming to terms with this concurrence, social scientists ought to remain sensitive to cultural factors. They should chart the subtle interaction between historical or social influences and the material or physical causes of behavior. Despite his reluctance to mimic the natural sciences, Weber was opposed to any historical description of events that made no systematic attempt at explanation. He suggested that explanatory theories be developed and actively employed in the social sciences. These social scientific theories would be based on the observed correlations of human events, institutions, attitudes, and values.
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Weber called these correlations “ideal types.” An ideal type is not a moral category but a conceptual construct that, by accentuating particular features of social phenomena, manages to explain these phenomena more efficiently and elegantly. One might, for instance, accentuate the role played by the president or prime minister of a country in order to make better sense of that country’s foreign policy. Perhaps a strong correlation can be found between a country’s foreign policy and its top executive’s psychological type, personal history, or ideological orientation. This theoretical framework may allow one to explain foreign policy neatly, leaving the waters unmuddied by complicated analyses of the role played by advisers, institutions, bureaucracies, the economic climate, or the election cycle. Ideal types put historical events, institutions, or (sets of ) attitudes and values into their “most consistent and logical forms.”9 Achieving this consistency and logic, Weber admitted, entails doing a certain amount of “violence to historical reality.”10 Political life is seldom, if ever, as neat and tidy an affair as the social scientist might desire. Ideal types are, by definition, “one-sided.” Without the construction of ideal types to simplify matters, however, the social scientist could not understand or portray the complex interplay of cultural and material forces that produce human history. Ideal types are like the conceptual lenses that create focused images of the world. In producing clear images, ideal types necessarily truncate reality, violating its integrity. The task at hand, according to Weber, was to do as little violence as possible to a complex reality while still developing a sufficiently powerful theory to explain it. Many social scientists adopt a Weberian approach in their efforts to understand and explain political phenomena. Others mingle elements of Weber’s insights with methods more prominent in the natural sciences. Political science is thus varied in its methodological approaches. Nonetheless, each of its traditional fields (such as Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Public Policy) aims to develop good theories that are confirmed by reliable data. Their practitioners, regardless of their chosen methodological approach, strive to construct conceptual lenses or maps that produce parsimonious, accurate, and significant pictures of political reality. In turn, they attempt to measure the political world accurately in order to confirm, or disconfirm, their theoretical perspectives. As we shall see in the following sections, the field of political theory stands out among the traditional fields of political science by focusing less on prediction and more on interpretation, less on the collection of empirical data and more on the conceptual and historical analysis of texts, less on the precise measurement of the political world and more on its normative assessment. The Interpretive Nature of Political Theory To the extent that human beings may be studied as mechanical objects or biological organisms, they are easily subject to scientific theorizing and the precise
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measurement this entails. Much modern medical research, for example, proceeds under these conditions. After all, the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology apply to human beings no less than to rocks, trees, and other animals. Nevertheless, the farther we move from the basic chemistry, physiology, or genetics of human life, the more difficult it becomes to theorize it scientifically. Employing physiological and evolutionary theories, we may with great accuracy explain why and predict how a person will cry out and pull away if suddenly jabbed with a sharp pencil. With somewhat less accuracy, employing economic theories and accounting for cultural traits, we may be able to explain why and predict how a person will react if offered $1,000 to break a pencil in two. In this case, the laws of physiology find an approximate analog in the demands of economic life that stimulate people to react according to the perceived costs and benefits of their opportunities. While economic incentives do not produce as predictable a reaction as acute physical pain, certain broad regularities are nonetheless observable. But the strictly scientific observer has no accurate predictions to make about the way a person will react when given a pencil and paper and asked to respond to the question “How should the exercise of individual liberty in a political community be balanced with the pursuit of social equality?” Only vague generalities could be mustered. Being self-reflective, humans consciously distinguish themselves from their environment, make themselves and others objects of thought, and turn these (systematically collected) thoughts about themselves and others into objects of further thought. This spiral of self-reflection has no predictable end point. The question about balancing the values of freedom and equality demands a response based on self-reflective experience. In answering this question, one would not simply react, as one does physiologically to pencil pricks. Nor would one behave in ways conforming to easily ascertained regularities, as one often does in response to economic incentives. Instead, one would first have to think about the world and one’s place in it and then respond on the basis of these reflections. Faced with this reality, the political theorist generally does not seek to predict behavior. Rather, the political theorist interprets human thought and action in ways that are illuminating and promote understanding. This brings us to a major difference between scientific theory and political theory. Scientific theory strives for objectivity. The scientific theorist is supposed to be a neutral observer whose feelings and biases are left outside the door of the laboratory. The scientist is detached from her subject matter, approaching it only by means of impersonal tools of analysis and measurement that anyone with similar skills could employ. Only in this way can repeated experimentation confirm theory, since any other scientist, employing the same procedures under the same conditions, will arrive at the same results. For theorists of social and political life, in contrast, the ability to feel and think in ways similar to the object of study is a crucial component of their task.
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The analysis of responses to the question about the appropriate balance between liberty and equality, for example, is necessarily grounded in the theorist’s own reflective experiences. Without such resonance between the theorist and the theorized, little of interest can be said. Humans, unlike plants and rocks, interpret themselves. To understand a self-interpreting being, one must be a selfinterpreting being. To do political theory, in other words, one must interpret others based on one’s own self-interpretations. A central task of political theory is to understand how humans understand themselves and their world. The theorist is concerned with meaning. Meaning is grounded not in objective laws but in shared or intersubjective understandings. The value of a political theory, therefore, is not primarily based on its generation of verifiable predictions. Its value is found in its capacity to inform and illuminate political life. In turn, political theories are not so much proven true or false as they are shown to be helpful or unhelpful in understanding collective existence, an existence that is rife with meaning but short on truth. To say that political theory is an interpretive rather than strictly scientific enterprise is to say something about what political theorists perceive when they look at the world as well as how they perceive it. Interpretive theory seeks to gain understanding of political life through self-reflective study. It is validated not by experimental verification but by its meaningfulness, that is, by the resonance it produces with its self-interpretive audience. This resonance often takes the form of critical engagement. It may be gauged by the extent to which a theory interrogates, informs, and illuminates individual experiences and collective existence.11 Political theorists vary greatly in the degree to which they tend toward the interpretive or scientific end of the social science spectrum. Some, like Weber, try to steer a middle course, taking what they can from science and balancing it with interpretive insight. Strict social scientists are often critical of interpretive theorists for producing ambiguous descriptions and lofty concepts with little empirical application. The charge is that the interpretive approach is too speculative and too subjective to aid us in explaining, predicting, or controlling concrete reality. For their part, interpretive political theorists are often critical of their social scientific colleagues for misunderstanding the nature of political life and the task of those who study it. They claim that social scientists too often view citizens as objects to be measured and efficiently managed instead of subjects to be critically understood and morally engaged. Often it is appropriate to measure and manage people—when they are commuters on busy highways, for instance. Measuring the habits of automobile drivers and controlling the cumulative effects of their behavior is crucial to avoiding congestion and ensuring efficient traffic regulation. But measuring and efficiently managing automobile drivers does not unduly detract from, and may eventually enhance, their experience of driving. Measuring and most efficiently
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managing citizens, interpretive theorists argue, may not be so benign. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) suggests that politics is a realm of freedom in which citizens mutually coordinate their activities in pursuit of the good life. If this is true, then what remains most significant about citizens, namely, their autonomy and moral purpose, is not susceptible to precise measurement and may be threatened by too efficient control. For these reasons, political theorists approach political events and actors more like works of art in need of interpretation than chemical reactions in need of explanation, prediction, or control. Interpretive theory, like scientific theory, attempts simply, accurately, and significantly to account for worldly phenomena. Yet it does so without making lawlike pronouncements that are subject to experimental confirmation. Instead, it offers suggestive conceptual insights that are subject to self-reflective commentary and critique. Hermeneutics and Intersubjectivity A brief look at the origins of the word theory will help to illustrate the selfreflective nature of interpretation. The word theory comes from the Greek word theoros. The theoros was originally an emissary sent on behalf of the state to consult an oracle (something like a fortune-teller) or to perform a religious rite. Later, the theoros took on the role of an envoy or spectator of foreign religious and cultural events who would report back to his native city. In time, theoria, the activity of the theoros, came to mean a form of contemplation, a kind of internal spectating. The terms theoria and theoros stem from thea, which means to look upon or view. Thus the fundamental relationship between theory and mental vision was already established in ancient Greece, where Western political theory began. How do you suppose the early Greek theoros gave reports of his voyages? How would he describe and explain to his compatriots the religious and cultural spectacles he had witnessed in other lands? Very likely, the theoros would make sense of these events, and make them understood to others, by remarking on their similarities to and differences from events with which he and his fellow citizens were familiar. For example, he might inform his audience that in the splendid Egyptian festival of the goddesses, the worship of Isis was similar in its form to the worship of the goddess Demeter in Greece. Drawing on the similarities between these two agricultural deities, the theoros would then be able to highlight some differences in the respective festivals and perhaps speculate on their origins and purposes. To be able to understand ritualistic behavior in Egypt, the theoros would have to make meaningful comparisons. To make sense of a form of behavior, one must understand the motivations that underlie it. To understand these motivations, one must have experienced similar sorts of motivations. In order to comprehend the concerns and passions
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that underlie a foreign religious practice, the theoros would have to have experienced similar concerns and passions. The chemist does not have to know what molecular bonding feels like to explain chemical reactions. When one is studying a network of self-reflective motivations, attitudes, and actions, however, comprehension demands certain common experiences. Interpretive theory, it follows, aims less at an objective explanation than an intersubjective understanding. Any account of the world that interpretive theory produces is grounded in shared experiences of this world. This is not to say that one cannot theorize about events without having participated in these same events or that one cannot understand someone’s beliefs, feelings, or behavior without having identical beliefs and feelings or without having engaged in the same behavior. Sometimes, because distance allows broader insight or because emotions do not cloud vision, a detached observer might understand a person’s motivations or attitudes better than that person herself. The detached observer could not do so, however, if she had never experienced similar motivations or attitudes. I can understand a child’s fervent belief in Santa Claus without currently believing, or even ever having believed, in Santa Claus. But I cannot well understand the nature of a child’s belief in Santa Claus without ever having held a belief based on hope and hearsay myself. In the same vein, trying to describe love to someone who has never experienced love would be like trying to describe a mountain panorama to someone who was born blind, or trying to describe a Beethoven symphony to someone who was born deaf. Where would one start? How would one proceed? It follows that the theoretical task of understanding the characteristics of political life, say, the love of justice, or the struggle to balance liberty with equality that largely defines the democratic quest, is only possible for those who have experienced these features of political life in some form, however attenuated or restricted their experiences may have been. In turn, the theoretical task of describing and explaining political life is based on the assumption that the theorist’s audience has shared similar experiences. The interpretive theorist seeks to understand other human beings as the thinking, feeling, believing, self-reflective, and socially integrated beings they are. The theorist would be at a severe disadvantage were she somehow to discard all her own values and commitments so as to approach this task as a detached observer. Of course, she must guard against allowing her idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, prejudices and predilections, to undermine or pervert her understanding of others. Without a palette of shared experiences to draw on, the theorist could not paint pictures of political reality that others could meaningfully share. While drawing upon her own experiences, however, the theorist must guard against painting pictures that always and only display her favorite colors. Owing to its intersubjective nature, political theory is often considered a hermeneutic exercise. Hermeneuts were people employed by the early Christian church to interpret the religious service and scripture to worshippers who spoke
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a different language. (The word hermeneut derives from the name of the Greek god Hermes, who was the patron deity of speech and writing.) In the nineteenth century, hermeneutics developed as a method of interpreting biblical texts and, later, other legal and literary documents. The German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) further expanded hermeneutics to encompass the interpretation of human experience in general, the historical text of human life. Dilthey, who influenced Max Weber, argued that nature provided a field for explanation but that humanity provided a field for understanding, in German, Verstehen. Explanation is based on external observation. Understanding is based on what Dilthey called “lived experience.” Dilthey wrote that “understanding of other people and their expressions is developed on the basis of experience and selfunderstanding and the constant interaction between them.”12 In other words, we understand people, their behavior and expressions, because we share with them the experience of certain thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and actions. Political theorists are hermeneuts who interpret things political. Like the biblical hermeneuts who interpreted religious services and scripture for those who shared the same faith, political theorists share certain attitudes and experiences with the members of their audience. Not all attitudes and experiences are shared, however. If they were, there would be little for the theorist to communicate and nothing for her to argue about. Even if the members of the theorist’s audience do not speak different languages or come from different cultures, they undoubtedly will have different conceptual schemes, beliefs, and values. Building bridges of political understanding between diverse perspectives using the foundations of shared experience is a central task of political theory. Political theory often puts its hermeneutic analysis to work in the interpretation of texts. Much political theory today consists of such critical commentary on the great texts of political thought written throughout the ages. Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, St. Augustine’s City of God, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, among many others, have each been subject to hundreds of interpretive analyses. These analyses may seek to clarify or criticize a text’s arguments, establish its practical import or describe the intent of its author. Political theory may also focus on active life rather than formal writing. Indeed, we may view people’s political attitudes, beliefs, and practices as texts that are in need of close and critical reading. Whether making its appearance on paper or on the stage of life, politics presents theorists with the challenge of interpretation. The interpretation of politics would not get off the ground if the theorist could not reflect on her own experiences and commitments. The conceptual lenses of theory are shaped by the emotions, desires, motivations, beliefs, judg-
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ments, interests, and values of the theorist. Scientific theorists who aim at objective observation and validation strive to eliminate all such individual biases. Interpretive theorists who seek intersubjective understanding accept individual biases as inevitable and indispensable, however troublesome they prove to be. Hans-Georg Gadamer observes that “to try to eliminate one’s own concepts in interpretation is not only impossible, but manifestly absurd. To interpret means precisely to use one’s own preconceptions so that the meaning of the text can really be made to speak for us.”13 Gadamer, who is well known for his hermeneutic analyses, insists that whenever we attempt to understand a text we always “project” our own “fore-conceptions” and “fore-meanings” on it. The goal for the interpretive theorist is not to eliminate preconceptions. These biases, Gadamer writes, “constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience. . . . They are simply conditions whereby we experience something—whereby what we encounter says something to us.”14 A preconception is to be understood less as a distortion that mars the purity of understanding than as the condition under which understanding first becomes possible. Preconceptions make for friction between the theorist and the text. They cause the theorist to move slowly and pay attention. But friction also makes movement possible. Attempting to theorize in the absence of preconceptions is like attempting to move in the absence of friction. If one tries to run on sheer ice with flat shoes, forward motion is very difficult. There is nothing against which one can push off, nothing that allows one to get started. Preconceptions are to theory what the sharp edge of a skate is to ice. The point is not blindly or uncritically to promote one’s prejudices. Their retention is certainly not the goal. One’s attitudes, beliefs, and values simply provide a starting point. “The important thing,” Gadamer writes, “is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text may present itself in all its newness and thus be able to assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings.”15 Good interpretation constantly seeks to replace initial preconceptions with more suitable ones as the reading of the text progresses. The first step to such interpretation, a hermeneutically oriented theorist observes, is to “abandon the prejudice of imagining that one can abandon all prejudice.”16 Knowing oneself is a condition of knowing and interpreting others. The obverse relation is also true. Knowing and interpreting others is a condition of knowing oneself. Gadamer calls this intersubjective understanding the theorist achieves with a text a “fusion of horizons.”17 To fuse horizons is not to agree with everything another person thinks, believes, or feels. To fuse horizons is not to fuse entire selves. Rather, it refers to the development, from initially divergent positions, of a sufficient level of understanding such that meaningful conversation can take place. Meaningful conversations do not necessarily produce agreement about the answers to the questions they address. But they do entail a basic agreement about the importance of the questions being asked, the merit of
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pursuing the conversation as a means of addressing these questions, and the need for appropriate answers. The act of interpretation effectively extends the theorist onto common ground with others. It demands that the theorist become porous, capable of absorbing and integrating previously foreign perceptions and insights. This extension of the self leaves one vulnerable but also poised for growth. As Gadamer writes: Understanding is an adventure and, like any other adventure, is dangerous. . . . Hermeneutical experience has a far less degree of certainty than that attained by the methods of the natural sciences. But when one realizes that understanding is an adventure, this implies that it affords unique opportunities as well. It is capable of contributing in a special way to the broadening of our human experiences, our selfknowledge, and our horizon.18 To undertake political theory is not so much to confirm one’s prejudices as to critically engage them. To challenge one’s preconceptions one must first acknowledge having them. Then one must leave them open to modification by way of an interpretive encounter with other texts and other people. In pursuing the craft of political theory, one necessarily begins by looking through one’s own lenses. But these conceptual tools are intended to be used as a means of discovering and understanding other viewpoints, of gaining glimpses through the lenses of other political thinkers or actors. On occasion, one may choose to adopt another’s point of view as one’s own. For the most part, the task of the theorist is more limited and yet more demanding. One studies political theory to facilitate a critical yet constructive engagement with diverse conceptual schemes of political life. The Normative Nature of Theory Political theory is inherently critical. To criticize means to judge. To judge means to measure something against certain standards. The inherently critical nature of political theory derives from its concern for norms. For this reason interpretive political theory is often called normative theory. A norm is an authoritative rule or standard. The word norm derives from norma, which is the Latin word for a carpenter’s square. Normative theory is concerned with the way things measure up. It seeks to understand not simply the way things are but also the way things ought to be. The political theorist investigates the standards guiding or regulating political life. These standards are grounded in self-understandings and intersubjective understandings and hence are available for interpretive analysis. If the theorist
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primarily focuses on the way people ought to act or behave, then she is concerned with the realm of ethics. Normative political theory, in this sense, is a form of ethical or moral theory. According to Aristotle, the theorist concerned with ethics not only aims to discover what the good is; she attempts to become good herself, and thus to give practical value to her normative inquiry.19 Theorists do not necessarily view themselves as (the best) practitioners of what they preach. Nonetheless, the normative theorist concerns herself with moral principles. And she may advocate particular norms as standards in accordance with which political life ought to be fashioned. The theorist might, for instance, construct a standard of distributive justice that stipulates how individuals within a community ought to allocate benefits and share burdens. Alternatively, she might construct a standard of civil rights that stipulates the extent to which the basic liberties of citizens must be protected from incursion by the society or state. Not all political theorists focus explicitly on ethical issues. The normative theorist may be less interested in the way people act or behave and more concerned with the way people think, learn, or form beliefs. Such a theorist would be primarily interested in epistemology, that is, in the study of the foundations of knowledge. The norms studied by the epistemologically oriented theorist are the rules or standards that determine when and how something gains the status of knowledge or truth. Certain feminist theorists, for instance, argue that women have different standards for (acquiring or generating) knowledge than do men and that these standards should not be judged inadequate simply because they are unlike those upheld by their male counterparts. Similar arguments have been made regarding the different epistemological standards manifested within particular cultures. (We investigate these claims in more detail in chapter 4.) Since words and deeds, thinking and acting, generally go together in political life, political theorists are usually interested in both epistemology and ethics. Indeed, the distinction between epistemology and ethics is often rather tenuous. We tend to act on the basis of our beliefs and understandings. We tend to form our beliefs and understandings on the basis of our actual engagements and experiences. To analyze or formulate the norms that regulate political life, therefore, is to enter into the overlapping fields of epistemology and ethics. For many political theorists, making normative judgments about the political world is an essential part of their enterprise. Political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973) writes: It is impossible to study social phenomena, i.e., all important social phenomena, without making value judgments. A man who sees no reason for not despising people whose horizon is limited to their consumption of food and their digestion may be a tolerable econometrist;
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he cannot say anything relevant about the character of human society. A man who refuses to distinguish between great statesmen, mediocrities, and insane impostors may be a good biographer; he cannot say anything relevant about politics and political history. . . . Generally speaking, it is impossible to understand thought or action or work without evaluating it. If we are unable to evaluate adequately, as we very frequently are, we have not yet succeeded in understanding adequately.20 The normative theorist is necessarily concerned with the standards of political life. This is not to say, however, that she seeks to impose her beliefs and values upon others. Indeed, the norms the theorist studies and advocates—particularly if they are oriented to democracy, diversity, fair play, individual liberties, civil rights, and the principle of tolerance—may strongly militate against the imposition of morality or the authoritarian regulation of behavior. Nonetheless, engaging in the defense of ideals such as democracy, diversity, fair play, individual liberties, civil rights, and the principle of tolerance very much remains a normative enterprise. “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves,” Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) wrote, “and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.”21 To inform people’s discretion and otherwise engage in political education is to adopt and inculcate specific norms. Yet this eminently normative enterprise is grounded in democratic beliefs about the moral autonomy of citizens. Some normative theorists argue for very specific beliefs or values. Others avoid explicitly advocating a particular moral position. They remain more broadly concerned with understanding the means and processes by which diverse attitudes and interests become articulated and integrated into political life. Nonetheless, every political theory facilitates the pursuit of some but not all courses of action and some but not all beliefs, attitudes, interests, and values. Thus all political theory prompts us to accept certain aspects of our world and to change others that are judged to be deficient. All good theories, moreover, demonstrate the virtue of significance—and we have no alternative but to rely on value judgments (what we, or a community of scholars, find interesting or important) to determine whether a theory is significant. As such, every political theory is normative in some degree. Conceptual and Historical Analysis The two primary means employed by the theorist to examine political norms and understandings are conceptual analysis and historical analysis. To analyze is
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to divide a whole into its constituent parts. Conceptual analysis takes a complex concept or system of ideas and examines its components to determine their meaning, the relationships they form with each other, and whether they constitute a coherent whole. For instance, one might analyze the concept of the nation-state by first dividing it into its constituent parts of geographic territory, a sovereign government that administers this territory, and an independent citizenry over which the government rules. Subsequently, one might investigate the meaning of these three terms and examine the nature of the relationships they form. Sovereign government may be defined as the formal institutions through which binding decisions are made for a society. Governments are formed by election or appointment (the gaining of political power), and engage in lawmaking (the legislative exercise of political power) and administration (the executive exercise of political power). Of course, each of these elements of government could become the object of further conceptual analysis. In turn, one might apply one’s understanding to specific cases. In liberal democratic nationstates, for example, the citizenry elects representatives who collectively form a government that presides by rule of law within constitutional limits. Engaging in conceptual analysis is like using a microscopic lens to investigate the texture and integrity of things. Engaging in historical analysis, in contrast, is like using a telescopic lens that allows one to see objects at a distance in the context of what precedes and follows them. The objects of historical analysis may be the political events or institutions of earlier times or the political writings of theorists from previous eras. In either case, the point is not only to gain knowledge of the past. The larger goal is to gain knowledge of contemporary times by viewing them afresh through historical lenses. Much historically oriented political theory effectively constitutes a history of the present. Historical analysis demonstrates that many features of political life that are currently taken for granted developed at particular times for particular purposes. The nation-state, for instance, is less than four hundred years old. One might date its rise to prominence from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years War. The nation-state system developed, in part, as a means of alleviating the bloody religious and imperial conflicts that afflicted Europe at that time. Previously, the chief political units had been empires, kingdoms, and city-states. Thus historical study prompts us to acknowledge that the nationstate is not an indelible feature of political life and may not be the chief political unit in the future. Quentin Skinner, an English political theorist, writes that studying the history of thought demonstrates the extent to which those features of our own arrangements which we may be disposed to accept as traditional or even “timeless” truths may in fact be the merest contingencies of our particular history and social structure. . . . Our society places unrecognizable constraints upon our
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imaginations. . . . The historical study of the ideas of other societies should be undertaken as an indispensable and irreplaceable means of placing limits on these constraints. . . . To learn from the past—and we cannot otherwise learn it at all—the distinction between what is necessary and what is the product merely of our own contingent arrangements, is to learn the key to self-awareness itself.22 For the political theorist, study of the past often provides the best means of understanding the present. Judith Shklar wrote, “Political theory . . . lives in the territory between history and ethics.”23 To identify our current political opportunities and obligations, we must grapple with our political inheritance. Normative concerns can never be completely eliminated from historical and conceptual analysis. While theorists may not openly advocate a particular moral position, the very topics chosen for historical or conceptual analysis are, by dint of being chosen, deemed of particular interest, importance, and value. In turn, the manner in which topics are approached will highlight certain features and obscure others. These unavoidable choices of subject matter and methodology harbor implicit normative valuations. If, in analyzing the state, one focuses predominantly on government administration rather than citizen activity, for example, one may lend credence to a top-down view of politics that ignores the significance of grassroots democratic processes. Deeming particular phenomena worthy of study and choosing to study them in particular ways are inherently normative decisions. The choices theorists make regarding the best way to identify and approach their subject, in other words, are often best described as “political” choices. As George Sabine wrote in his classic text, the historical study of political theory ought to be carried out “in the light of the hypothesis that theories of politics are themselves a part of politics.”24 Political theories are not simply theories about politics. Political theories are, to a certain extent, politicized theories. The theorist not only thinks about politics. She thinks through politics and she thinks politically. These are inherently normative activities. The conceptual and historical analyses performed by political theorists are frequently not ends in themselves. They serve as the forestage to syntheses, the piecing back together of conceptual systems or historical narratives. The constructive effort to provide a holistic view of things political, even more so than the analysis of its constituent parts, creates a standard or norm for understanding and action. In supplying better ways of understanding political life we are implicitly suggesting that there are better ways of participating in political life based on our improved understandings. To supply a right way of knowing, one might argue, is to imply a right way of acting. The Republic, written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.), provides a good example of this point. The Republic is widely recog-
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nized as the first major work of political theory. It remains to this day, by many estimates, the most important. For this reason, Plato’s Republic has been subjected to countless analyses, both conceptual and historical. Both sorts of analyses have served to increase our understanding of politics and to inform our political practice. Plato’s text certainly lends itself to these two related tasks. The Republic examines the concept of justice by way of an extended discussion between Socrates (469–399 B.C.), Plato’s teacher, and a small number of other Athenians, mostly young men. A key component of Plato’s argument is the assumption that in coming to understand the meaning of justice, one is also learning how to act justly. Indeed, the stronger claim is made that to know the just is also to be just. For Plato, knowledge is virtue. One can only act viciously out of ignorance. Epistemology and ethics not only go hand in hand, they march in lockstep. Sustained philosophical analysis carried out earnestly in the pursuit of truth, Plato maintains, is the only route to creating adequate political norms and securing the good life. By no means do all political theorists agree with Plato on this point. Even Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, contested his teacher’s claim that knowledge constitutes virtue. Nonetheless, Aristotle, like most political theorists today, acknowledges the important connection between thinking and acting, epistemology and ethics. It may not be true that knowledge is always virtue, or even that virtue presupposes firm knowledge. One might be able to know what justice is without acting justly, and perhaps also act justly without well knowing—or being able to explain—what justice is. Nonetheless, in suggesting how we best understand political life, the political theorist is implicitly if not explicitly suggesting how political affairs ought to be put in order. The kinds of conceptual lenses one employs influences what one sees and how one sees it. This applies to ancient thinkers such as Plato no less than to contemporary theorists. On the portals of Plato’s school, called the Academy, were inscribed the words: “Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here.” Plato’s students were trained in geometry because evaluating forms in the mathematical world was believed to be the proper intellectual preparation for the ethical evaluations demanded of one in the political world. One might read Plato to suggest, therefore, that moral and political knowledge is of the same eternal and unchanging nature as mathematical truths. The ideals that his political realm are designed to replicate on earth are already to be found—eternal and invariable—in the heavens. These ideals can be apprehended by humans, but only through the intellect rather than through the senses. Plato depreciates sensory experience because it cannot lead to knowledge of unchanging truths, which he called the Forms. Through our senses we never experience true circles or triangles, for instance, but only approximations of them sketched on paper. To apprehend absolute
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circularity or triangularity, we must reach beyond our senses to perceive the Form of the circle or triangle with our intellect. Only an abstract, intellectual apprehension allows these entities to be truly known. Likewise, Plato suggests that political concepts such as justice can never be adequately grasped by our senses. They are apprehended only through philosophical intellection. Once political entities are defined as eternal truths that remain uninformed by our sensory experiences, they become as inflexible and immutable as geometric categories and definitions. A circle is a circle is a circle. And justice is justice for Plato, regardless of the circumstances. The Republic’s authoritarian rule and social caste system reflect the rigidity of this geometric vision. If we read Plato quite literally (rather than as an ironic thinker, as we discuss in chapter 7), the inflexibility of his theoretical lenses appears to produce an equally unyielding political life. Aristotle criticizes Plato for trying to reduce the diverse, evolving political community to an unchanging, unitary state. Geometric categories and truths, Aristotle argues, are not the sort of standards by which human affairs can or should be measured. Aristotle aptly observes that when measuring things political, it is best to use a ruler that is flexible. In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle states that we should not attempt to fashion our epistemological or ethical standards in politics with the precision of the carpenter’s square. Politics is a diffuse and variable affair. The level of exactness we pursue in our political assessments should not exceed that allowed by the subject matter. Aristotle holds that the measuring rod for politics ought to be pliable. It should resemble the measuring rod made of soft lead that was developed in his time by the architects and masons on the island of Lesbos. A leaden rule can measure things of various shapes better than a rigid square because it can bend to conform to these shapes. Likewise, the norms appropriate for assessing the world of politics need to be flexible. In order to account for a world filled with unpredictable irregularities and ambiguities, our conceptual schemes must not be so rigid as to make them unfit for use. To buttress his point, Aristotle records the varieties of political life encountered in other lands and in other times. He demonstrates that comparative investigations, by broadening our perspective, may give our conceptual analysis the flexibility appropriate to the study of politics. To illustrate the need for this theoretical flexibility we might recall the ancient Greek myth of Procrustes. Procrustes was a famous robber known for mutilating his victims. He would stretch or cut off the legs of people so they would fit snugly into his bed. To call something Procrustean is to suggest that it produces uniformity and exactness by rough or violent methods. Political theorists must be wary of their Procrustean impulses. In an effort to make the world fit neatly into their conceptual schemes, theorists may be tempted to lop off all
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those parts that prove unwieldy. If we try to make the world of politics reflect uniform, geometric visions, we are likely to do much violence to it. The mark of a good education, Aristotle insists, is knowing which fields of study allow for certainty and exactitude and which do not. Politics, he observes, is not an exact science. Its study depends less on precise measurement than on contextual understanding grounded in shared experience. By developing their own conceptual lenses while remaining receptive to the different viewpoints of others, interpreters of political life may strike an appropriate balance between the intellectual demands of theory and the practical and moral demands of an ambiguous, complex, and unruly world. Suggested Readings Fred Dallmayr and Thomas McCarthy, eds. Understanding and Social Inquiry Bent Flyvbjerg. Making Social Science Matter Hans-Georg Gadamer. Reason in the Age of Science Clifford Geertz. The Interpretation of Cultures John Gunnell. Political Theory Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Karl Popper. The Logic of Scientific Discovery George Sabine. A History of Political Theory Leo Strauss. What Is Political Philosophy and Other Studies Eric Voegelin. The New Science of Politics Max Weber. The Methodology of the Social Sciences Sheldon Wolin. Politics and Vision
chapter 2
The Question of Human Nature POLITICAL THEORY EXAMINES the rights and responsibilities, obligations
and prerogatives of citizens and governments. To theorize about politics, therefore, is to investigate how human beings organize their collective lives. But what makes human beings different from other animals in this regard? The question of human nature arises for every theorist interested in the question of politics. What are the defining characteristics of a human being? Humans have developed technology. Humans make and employ tools and machines. But that is not an unqualified distinction. Other animals, such as elephants, many primates, and certain birds, use primitive tools, such as sticks, to get food or scratch themselves. Chimpanzees use rocks and bones as weapons, and certain ants have domesticated plants and animals for the production of their own food, excelling in the crafts of cultivating yeasts and fungi and farming and “milking” aphids. While other species may use tools, however, they do not actually “make” tools, certainly not complex tools or machines. The sophistication of human technology is unparalleled. Perhaps, however, we can discover a characteristic that is uniquely human. One might suggest that human beings are unique because humans alone have language. But the case here is similar to that of technology (not surprisingly perhaps, since language is, in one sense, a tool). Many other animals use symbolic gestures to communicate. Honeybees engage in an elaborate “waggle dance” to let their fellow bees know precisely where sources of food are to be found. Dolphins employ a complex series of high-pitched tones to communicate. Likewise, whales “sing” to each other in conversations that can last hours. Vervet monkeys can warn each other whether snakes or eagles or leopards are approaching with distinct sounds that clearly identify each type of predator. Chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans have been trained to communicate with rudimentary elements of human sign language. Often these animals not only respond to questions but also initiate communication, make basic requests and have even taught each other to use sign language.1 Still, no other species has achieved the sophistication and creativity of language use that humans have. More specifically, no other species seems capable
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of using original combinations of words in a rule-governed fashion, employing a grammar or syntax. Yet this skill comes naturally to human beings. Most of us speak grammatically in relatively complex sentences from the time we are three or four years old without any formal training. The complexity of human language allows for the development of reason. Reason might be defined as the capacity to think logically, to deliberate coherently, and to infer consistently. Reason allows one to separate, contrast, and combine thoughts so as to establish sustained chains and patterns of ideas. Language, in combination with reason, vastly extends our mental reach. This intellectual extension, and the creative and analytical power it allows, accounts for the development of our technology. Our sophisticated technological capacity is largely derivative of our capacity for language and reason. Our linguistic and rational capacities make us unique among animals. Aristotle made a similar claim over two millennia ago. He defined human being as a zoon logon echon, a rational, speaking animal. Aristotle also defined human being as a zoon politikon, a political animal. These two definitions are mutually supportive. The two key features of a human being—a linguistic, rational nature and a political nature—go hand in hand. One might say that we are political because we have language and reason, and we have language and reason because we are political. In calling the human being a political animal, Aristotle suggests that what makes humans different from the rest of the animal kingdom is their capacity to live together in a manner that other animals do not and cannot achieve. He observes that we live politically, whereas other animals that sleep, travel, forage, or hunt in groups only live collectively. Animal collectivities are often organizationally sophisticated and behaviorally complex. Ant, bee and wasp colonies, for example, are hierarchically ordered, with distinct leaders and followers and quite sophisticated divisions of labor. Along with other social animals, they may engage in complex collective activities such as eugenics, warfare and slavery. Mammals, and primates in particular, evidence many of the tendencies basic to political life, such as struggles for leadership, reciprocity in relationships, punishment for rule-breaking, the mitigation of conflict, and mutual aid.2 What differentiates human societies from animal colonies, packs, and herds, therefore, is not that humans organize themselves or that this organization results in complex collective order. Certain animals, such as ants, bees and wasps, create societies that exhibit a much greater degree of order with much less disruption than human societies. Still, human society is unique, Aristotle claims, and uniquely political. The reason, one might hypothesize, is that humans understand themselves to be distinct individuals—unprecedented and unrepeatable beings—who exist within a community made up of other distinct individuals. Some animals, such as bees or ants, are fully collective beings. Other animals, such as spiders, snakes,
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and bears, are mostly solitary creatures. Some animals may engage in both a solitary and a collective existence; dogs and wolves, for instance, live at times as loners and at other times as members of packs. Yet no other animal thinks, speaks, or acts self-consciously as an individual within a community. Certain human cultures celebrate the individual, while others emphasize the importance of the community. Yet all political cultures evidence a conscious tension between individuality and community. To live politically, it follows, one must be able to conceive oneself as an individual within a community of individuals. More specifically, one must be capable of reflecting on the meaning of individuality as something that is shared by all human beings while defining each as a unique entity. Only abstract thought allows us to understand ourselves as such unique parts within a complex whole. Abstract thought is possible only if one can distance oneself from a singular stream of consciousness. Abstract thought requires a temporary and at least partial escape from all-consuming desires, drives, and inclinations. To think of oneself abstractly, one must escape one’s impulses long enough to be able to glance back on oneself, to see oneself as some distinct thing that is available for evaluation and judgment. In other words, one must become self-conscious. As a self-conscious being, one not only wills something but understands oneself to be willing. One not only desires or ponders something but understands oneself to be desiring or pondering. To think abstractly is to extend one’s mind through language and reason, achieving a distance from one’s inner drives that demonstrates self-consciousness. Human beings, unlike animals, not only desire and act but also evaluate their desires and actions rationally and self-reflectively. Consequently, they can indulge, deny, postpone, or reroute their desires and actions, having judged them from a more encompassing vantage point that allows present inclinations and behavior to be weighed against more abstract or distant concerns. They may learn from the past and prepare for the future not out of instinct but from thoughtful projection. They can learn to care for others not only from emotional attachment but also from a sense of duty. Importantly, self-reflection is never attained in isolation. Becoming selfconscious is a process that human beings achieve only when they grow up among other human beings, in linguistic or language-speaking communities.3 Consciousness, as the word itself indicates, is a “knowing with” (con-sciousness). We come to know things with others, by way of sharing the world in speech. Self-consciousness arises out of the human capacity to partake communicatively in the experiences of others. Language typifies and preserves experience in words. It allows us to understand what others think of the world and of us. It also allows us to look back on our lives and ourselves. Through language we can view ourselves from a more
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detached, rational point of view, in terms of abstract categories, such as individuality and community membership. The human capacity for sophisticated language and reason culminates in a political sensibility that makes humans truly unique. To summarize: The tensioned balance that exists between the self-conscious individual and the community constitutes the core of politics. Our experiencing and organizing ourselves in the light of this balance defines our lives as political animals. Thus political life depends on the ability of people to conceive themselves as individuals within a community of individuals. Thinking of oneself as an individual within a community of individuals, in turn, depends on a capacity for self-reflective, abstract thought. And the capacity for self-reflective, abstract thought depends on the development of language and reason. Hence political life is a historical achievement. It was unavailable to the evolutionary ancestors of human beings who had less sophisticated capacities of language and reason. Yet the development of language and reason depends on the existence of community. Which, then, came first, political life or language and reason? This quandary will likely never be solved. It is much like the puzzle of whether the chicken or the egg came first. There is no satisfying answer. Most likely, a rudimentary form of self-reflective language and reason developed simultaneously with a rudimentary form of political life in prehistoric human communities. The zoon politikon and the zoon logon echon always were, and remain today, one and the same animal. Aristotle rightly defined human being as a rational, speaking animal and a political animal. We must not forget the last word of each phrase. Human beings remain animals. We are biological creatures. By many measures, our similarities to other animals far outweigh our differences from them. Nature (the impact of biology) is often contrasted with nurture (the impact of culture). Both nature and nurture continue to play important roles in politics. Not only our culture but also our biology shapes and constrains our political life. To understand the link between human nature and politics, we must take this biological influence seriously. The Political Significance of Human Nature What is the relationship between biology and politics, nature and nurture, and which is the more powerful force shaping our lives? These questions are as old as political thinking itself. “Few ideas,” a historian writes, “have been recycled as often as the belief that the ‘Is’ of nature must become the ‘Ought’ of man.”4 From ancient through modern times, political theorists have attempted to erect political edifices upon the foundations of human nature. To solve the quandaries of political life, it has consistently been argued, we must first address the
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question of human nature. The tradition of political theory may be understood as a long struggle to satisfy this prerequisite and build upon it. Let us examine the relevant thoughts of a small sample of theorists. Plato’s politics follows directly from his understanding of human nature. Plato argues that the human soul is composed of three parts: an animal-like appetitive or desiring part, a humanlike emotional or spirited part, and a godlike intellectual or reasoning part. Plato structures the political realm to accommodate this innate, psychic composition. In the Republic, three classes or castes of individuals represent the three facets of human nature. Merchants and tradespeople, who are mostly actuated by their appetites and base desires, form the lowest caste. Soldiers, who are mostly actuated by their spirited emotions and love of honor, form the middle caste. Philosophers and rulers known as guardians, who are mostly actuated by their reason or intellect, form the top caste. Through intensive education, children of lower castes may occasionally gain access to the upper castes. By and large, however, the political community is organized on the basis of individuals’ natural propensities. Indeed, Plato suggests, perhaps fancifully, that maintaining the best regime would entail a sophisticated program of eugenics or selective breeding. Human reproduction would have to be controlled so as to ensure the best stock for the ruling caste. Integrating Plato’s (and the neo-Platonists’) distinction between the ideal and the real with Christian theology, St. Augustine (354–430), a North African bishop and philosopher, distinguished between the “City of God” and the “city of man.” Augustine writes that “everyone, since he takes his origin from a condemned stock, is inevitably evil and carnal to begin with, by derivation from Adam.”5 Based on this understanding of humankind’s fallen nature, Augustine concludes that secular government, the “city of man,” is inherently unstable and doomed to disruption. His prescriptions for politics are grounded in these beliefs about the inherited features of human nature. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) brought medieval theory to its height by integrating Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology. Aquinas, an Italian scholastic and philosopher, argues that the government of a king is best because it follows the dictates of (human) nature. He writes, Whatever is in accord with nature is best, for in all things nature does what is best. In the multitude of bodily members there is one which is the principal mover, namely, the heart; and among the powers of the soul one power presides as chief, namely, the reason. . . . Wherefore, if artificial things are an imitation of natural things and a work of art is better according as it attains a closer likeness to what is in nature, it follows that it is best for a human multitude to be ruled by one person.6
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Aquinas also argues that humankind’s natural reason leaves it relatively well equipped to lead a peaceful, political life. His political prescriptions follow directly from his understanding of human nature. In modern times, Thomas Paine (1737–1809), the American patriot, theorist, and pamphleteer, argued for limited government based on his notion of the inherently social nature of humankind. Paine writes, To understand the nature and quantity of government proper for man, it is necessary to attend to his character. As Nature created him for social life . . . she made his natural wants greater than his individual powers. . . . She has not only forced man into society, by a diversity of wants, which the reciprocal aid of each other can supply, but she has implanted in him a system of social affections, which, though not necessary to his existence, are essential to his happiness. . . . If we examine, with attention, into the composition and constitution of man . . . we shall easily discover that a great part of what is called government is mere imposition. Government is no farther necessary than to supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not conveniently competent.”7 In an original twist on an Aristotelian theme, Paine invokes the social nature of human beings as an argument against overbearing government. James Madison (1751–1836), a contemporary of Paine, contributed his famous essay on factions to The Federalist Papers. Here Madison explicitly attributes political strife to the fallibility of human reason and the indelible effects of human passion and self-love. He writes that the “latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.”8 With this in mind, Madison sets out to construct a form of government that will compensate for humanity’s inherent shortcomings. Human nature provides the timber with which every politics must be constructed. Many political theorists, like Madison, argue that such crooked timber requires sophisticated architectural engineering, that is to say, the construction of a good constitution and government, to achieve adequate results. Other theorists forgo tinkering with political institutions and set out instead to straighten the timber of humanity itself through revolutionary practice. In either case, a theory of human nature becomes the prerequisite for a theory of politics. Consider in greater detail how one political theorist famously carried on the tradition of structuring politics on a model of human nature. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was much impressed by Euclidean geometry, a science that deduced firm conclusions from self-evident axioms. Like Plato, Hobbes strove to make his political theory mathematical. Making and maintaining a commonwealth,
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Hobbes writes, entails discovering and applying the same sort of rules as are found in arithmetic and geometry.9 Hobbes’s theory of human nature is vastly different from Plato’s, however, and consequently so is the form of politics he proposes. Hobbes departed from the ancient Greeks by embracing modern science. The sixteenth-century scientist Galileo observed, contrary to a longstanding tradition grounded in Aristotelian philosophy, that an object stays in motion until acted upon by another force. Hobbes applied this tenet of modern science to the human animal. Our inner drives, Hobbes assumed, are constantly in motion and remain ever unsatisfied. Chief among our insatiable drives is the desire for power. Hobbes was born in 1588 in an English coastal town then threatened by the Spanish Armada. He later wrote that fear and he were born twins. Indeed, Hobbes’s political theory revolves around the notion that fear is the most fundamental human passion and the chief motivating force of politics. Human beings are subject to an endless pursuit of power, Hobbes insists, owing to their fear of death or deprivation at the hands of others. He observes that even the strongest man can easily be struck dead in his sleep by the weakest man. Likewise, one’s power can always be undermined or destroyed by another’s greater power or by one’s lack of vigilance. Thus we naturally seek ever-increasing power in order to protect ourselves. Of course, everyone else feels the same way and acts accordingly. The result is the endless pursuit of power after power by all, which, in the absence of government, leads to violent anarchy. Without rules and rulers to enforce them, a war of all against all ensues. In this anarchic state of nature, Hobbes states in a famous passage, life is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”10 Once we accept the premises of Hobbes’s deductive theory, namely, that ever-fearful humans seek power after power “ending only in death,” his conclusion inevitably follows. There is but one way to escape the constant fear of being killed or subdued. Everyone must agree to make one person (or a single governmental body) an all-powerful sovereign. This “Leviathan,” as Hobbes calls the supreme governmental power, would be capable of forcibly maintaining peace and order among its subjects. The only alternative to anarchy, for Hobbes, is authoritarian government. Why is submission to despotism better than living in the state of nature? It seems like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Hobbes’s response is that with the creation of a sovereign power, one at least knows where the heat is coming from. The sovereign has no reason to fear his subjects because he is allpowerful. Accordingly, he has no reason to kill or otherwise harm them unless they get out of line. For individuals primarily motivated by fear of death and deprivation, a peaceful life under despotic rule is better than freedom in a state of endless war.
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Hobbes had translated the writings of the ancient Greek thinker Thucydides (c. 460–400 B.C.), considered by many to be the first political theorist. Thucydides participated in and wrote about the Peloponnesian War, a conflict between the city-states of Athens and Sparta that lasted the better part of three decades. Hobbes appears to have well learned the lesson on power that Thucydides taught. As Thucydides recounts, the islanders of Melos requested that they be left out of the war and given liberty to pursue their own business rather than pay tribute to Athens. The Athenians refused, responding that they could not, or would not, give up their imperial prerogatives. The Athenians justified their proposed destruction of the Melians by invoking a law of nature: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”11 The pursuit of power is natural and endless, Thucydides seemed to be saying. Hobbes accepted Thucydides’ pronouncement as a universal law. Nevertheless, Hobbes wrote his masterwork, the Leviathan, at the time of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, when the European territorial state declared its sovereignty after centuries of dominance by kingdoms and empires recently ripped apart by bloody religious wars. Hobbes believed that within the sovereign nation-state, the interminable human struggle for power might be curtailed. The law of nature that dictated the endless pursuit of power could not be thwarted, but it could be brought under control by a supreme national ruler. Human nature, for Hobbes, inevitably creates a world wherein the fear of violent death binds men and women together into groups ruled by a sovereign power. With reason playing only a minor role among human motivations and with the appetite for power running rampant, Hobbes did not think it prudent to await the arrival of a philosopher king. Hobbes deduced that the rational rule of philosophers is neither likely, necessary, nor recommendable. Peaceful despotism, in contrast, is achievable and quite acceptable. The despot need not be particularly intelligent, rational, or virtuous. By ending the anarchical war of all against all—the worst of all possible worlds—the sovereign, whatever his faults and shortcomings, deservedly gains the allegiance of all. Though arriving at different conclusions, Hobbes, like most theorists before and after him, grounds his political theory on a theory of human nature. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, many debates continue to rage about the relation between human nature and politics. Feminist political theorists question the biological basis of patriarchy or male domination and the cultural formation of gender distinctions. Environmental political theorists confront the “natural” human disposition for shortsighted behavior, examine its ecological costs, and speculate on its possible remedies. Postmodern political theorists, in their concern with the “social construction” of identity, face the problem of determining the extent to which our biological nature constrains what we (or society) make of ourselves.
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In these contemporary cases, as in the efforts of earlier theorists, the political processes and structures prescribed for human beings are grounded in particular beliefs about human nature. Indeed, one might say, along with Canadian political theorist C.B. Macpherson, that the overall merit of a theory largely rests on the depth of its insight into human nature.12 It should come as no surprise, then, that an examination of human biology provides access to the terrain of political life. Human biology does not determine human politics in any straightforward sense. Certainly biological knowledge will never settle our more pressing and enduring political concerns. But exploring the biological side of human nature may inform our understanding of its political features. With this in mind, human biological propagation may serve as an apt analogy for the theorist’s effort to propagate political concepts, norms, principles, and ideas. The Genetic Leash Human beings, like other animals, are largely products of their genes. Genes are the building blocks of life. They are composed of molecular coils, called DNA, that are capable of replicating themselves. Genes group together in large numbers to form chromosomes, the biochemical codes, or “blueprints,” that regulate the development of many of our features and characteristics. There are chromosomes, for instance, that determine one’s sex, eye and hair color, general height, and many other physical attributes. Human beings have most of their genes in common. Over 90 percent of any person’s genes are identical to the genes of every other human being. This sharing of genetic material is what makes us all members of the same species, Homo sapiens, as opposed to cats or birds. Genetically, humans have much more in common than they have in contrast. The vast majority of the codes within our genetic blueprint ensure that we develop as human beings. A small minority of our genes ensure that we develop as different sorts of human beings. Most of this genetic variation makes human beings unique individuals. A much smaller amount makes human beings members of specific races or ethnic groups. Indeed, there is over six times the amount of genetic difference, for example, between two individual Swedes chosen at random than there is between the average of Swedes and the average of, say, Aboriginal Australians or African Bushmen.13 When investigating the extent to which our biology determines our politics, we must keep in mind that what makes us political animals is not solely the small proportion of our genes that make us unique individuals or members of particular races or ethnic groups. We are political animals because of the vastly larger proportion of our genes that make us human beings in the first place. As human beings, we are biologically enabled, one might even say biologically
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encouraged, to live politically. Unlike other animals, humans are genetically designed to grow large, complex brains and sophisticated organs of speech. Certain portions of our brains, specifically the neocortex and limbic systems, enable us to engage in reasoning, abstract conceptualization and speech, selfreflection, and extended emotional attachment. These attributes make humans eminently political creatures. Our genetic blueprints make us political animals, but to what extent do they determine the specific nature of our politics? The shaping and constraining of our political life by our biology is perhaps best illustrated by a metaphor. Consider the image of our biological nature holding our politics, and our culture as a whole, on a leash.14 This leash is fairly long and quite elastic. Political life may develop in any number of directions, but it cannot totally free itself from its biological foundation. Consider the following example. A people may decide to ground its collective life on democratic principles such that all adults receive a vote in determining the management of common concerns. Biology has little to say about the nature of this democracy or even about the development of democratic government as opposed to despotic government. Yet biology does prompt political communities not to give equal political status to babies and small children. Since humans develop their emotional, intellectual, and physical capabilities at a very slow rate compared to other animals, humans remain incapable of effectively participating in political affairs for over a decade after their birth. As political beings, then, humans self-consciously shape their relationships and activities. Yet they carry out this shaping within certain limits set by their genetic constitution. Although our genes constrain politics in certain respects, we should remember that these same genes make politics possible in the first place. In turn, politics—and culture in general—stretches the leash of our genes. Were we genetically incapable of developing a sophisticated political and cultural life, our genes would determine much more of our experiences than they currently do. As is the case with other animals, our genetic leashes would then be much shorter and much stiffer. Among the erectly postured, apelike creatures that preceded the evolution of human beings some 12 million years ago, one may assume that culture and politics barely existed. Like the rest of the animal kingdom, the behavior of these early hominids was highly determined by their genes, by way of instinctive drives. The genetic leashes were very short and very stiff. Over millions of years of evolution, changes in genetic structure allowed rudimentary forms of culture and politics to emerge. As this culture and politics developed, the genetic leash became increasingly stretched, allowing further and faster cultural and political development. Ethical discourse, for instance, was impossible before humans gained the capacities for speech and reason. These capacities, in turn, could not develop
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until humans underwent the physiological evolution that produced their uniquely structured larynx and brain. Once the capacities for speech and reason allowed early human beings to engage in moral thought and action, however, the boundaries of the activities that were circumscribed by our genetic blueprints became increasingly stretched. Moral precepts, for example, both restricted the types of behavior that instinct and appetite stimulated and induced other kinds of behavior that instinct and appetite did not stimulate. That is to say, not only do our genes hold our politics and culture on a leash, but our politics and culture also hold our genes on a leash. Indeed, the entire history of human development is largely a product of the pulling and tugging between our genes and our culture. Let us look at an example of this pulling and tugging between nature and nurture. It is likely that among the immediate precursors to Homo sapiens, who lived over 300,000 years ago, the growth of the brain was not only the cause but also the effect of cultural development. Among these hominids, cultural development fostered and accelerated physiological evolution. The development of midwifery (aided childbearing) allowed baby hominids with larger heads, and hence larger brains, to pass more successfully through the relatively small pelvic cavities of their mothers. (Being upright walkers, hominids, like modern humans, had narrow hips.) These larger-brained children would eventually reproduce, passing on their genes for larger brains to their own children. Thus the development of social cooperation during childbirth contributed to the evolution of larger brains. “Whereas many accounts of the expansion of hominid evolution focus on male activities, such as hunting, group defense, or knowledge of the terrain,” a political scientist observes, “an explanation based on social cooperation [of women during childbirth] emphasizes a factor that otherwise would have limited evolution toward larger brain size. . . . It is often argued that humans cooperate in society because they have big brains. Perhaps the truth is that we have big brains because we cooperate in society.”15 In fact, it is the complex structure of the human brain, not only its size, that enables sophisticated speech, reason, and cultural development. Neanderthals had larger heads and larger brains 40,000 years ago than we do today. Yet they were virtually without culture. Nonetheless, the general point remains: while the growth of large, complex brains fostered the development of culture, some rudimentary culture was needed to foster the proliferation of humans with large, complex brains. Human biological development and cultural development have gone hand in hand from time immemorial. As a distinguished biologist observes, attempting completely to separate biology from culture and nature from nurture, as competing causes of human development, is like attempting to determine whether the area of a rectangle is caused more by its length or its width.16 This view was first voiced over two millennia ago. “The moral virtues,” according to
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Aristotle, “are produced in us neither by Nature nor against Nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.”17 Our culturally induced habits build upon and in turn redirect our natural dispositions. To understand human development, including human political development, one must know something about both the biological and the cultural foundations of life. Genes and Mores As the building blocks of organic life, either in single units or in complex combinations, genes provide the information directives that produce and sustain organic development in nature. In the realm of politics, the corresponding role is taken on by mores. Mores are the building blocks of political life. The word mores comes from the Latin translation of the Greek word for ethics. For the ancient Greeks, ethics was a broader concept than what we understand by the term today. It pertained not only to individual conscience and explicitly moral duties but to all standards or norms grounded in custom. Likewise, mores pertain not only to the moral rules that regulate individual behavior but to all the concepts, conventions, principles, rules, and understandings that maintain a social order. Like all rules, mores restrict behavior. But they also serve as resources and stimulants of behavior. The rules of grammar, by way of comparison, restrict the manner in which we speak. We are forced to use nouns and verbs in a particular fashion. But these same rules allow us to speak intelligibly, to be understood and to solicit responses. Likewise, mores induce forms of behavior that are conducive to the formation and maintenance of a particular social order while they impede other sorts of behavior that would prove destructive of this order. Certain mores, such as the principles of justice, may prove antagonistic to (some features of ) an existing social order if that order is grounded in exploitation and domination. There are revolutionary mores just as there are conservative ones. There are mores designed for ideal worlds just as there are mores developed for the real world. What genes are to nature, mores are to culture in general and to politics in particular. Just as genes order the biological construction and maintenance of organisms, mores order the cultural construction and maintenance of societies. Yet mores are not immune to the effects of our genes. To retrieve our metaphor, we might say that our genes hold our mores on a leash. This simply reiterates the point that our biology influences our political and social life without determining it in every instance. The genes that cause us to grow hair on various parts of our bodies, for example, do not determine what we will do with this hair. Culture has an almost unrestricted latitude to prescribe variations in its cutting, shaving, extirpating, tending, coloring, and adorning. Likewise, some of our
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genes determine us to be sexual reproducers (as opposed to asexual reproducers, like flatworms). These genes ensure that sex between men and women will occur in all cultures and that the sexual drive will not easily be ignored. Consequently, these genes effectively determine that all societies will develop mores to regulate and ritualize sexual relations and sexuality. Yet the expression of human sexuality is extremely varied. The kind of sexual mores that develop is highly dependent on historical and cultural context. What is invariable, however, is that sexual mores of some sort develop. To take another example, our genes determine that children remain dependent during the first few years of their lives. Human babies and young children are incapable of fending for themselves and reproducing during this rather extended period. (Mice, by way of contrast, not only nourish, shelter, and protect themselves, but start to reproduce by two months of age.) Many different aspects of human culture have developed in response to this biological constraint. The institution of marriage, the celebration of family life, and the development of educational institutions are only a few of the cultural artifacts that compensate for or take advantage of our lengthy period of childhood immaturity and dependence. These cultural institutions, grounded in biological constraints, greatly influence political life. As Aristotle observed, the springs of politics and justice are to be found in the extended bonding of parent and child.18 The nature of the rules, principles, customs, conventions, and understandings surrounding marriage, family life, and education differs markedly from culture to culture and even within the same culture. Yet the extent to which humans can wholly abandon these mores is severely circumscribed by the biological facts of human propagation and development. Until we can produce more self-sufficient infants by way of genetic engineering—a frightening thought—our culture will be forced to compensate for the extended helplessness of children. Thus while it is inevitable that certain social arrangements and institutions develop to accommodate childhood dependency, the manner in which these arrangements and institutions develop is open to tremendous variation. Consider a more controversial issue. Only women bear children. That is genetically determined. Historically, women have also filled the role of their children’s primary caretaker. That is not genetically determined, but it is likely that genes had something to do with the development of this behavioral pattern. A human being’s genetic constitution largely determines the production of hormones and enzymes. Particular hormones and enzymes induce most boys from a very early age to be relatively more aggressive, while other hormones and enzymes induce most girls to be relatively more nurturing. Good evidence also suggests that in the aggregate women are genetically endowed with greater verbal ability, perceptual speed, and fine motor skills, while men have the edge in spatial perception and quantitative calculation. These differences are likely the
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product of hundreds of thousands of years of genetic adaptation among early hominids faced with the distinct demands of childrearing and hunting.19 Yet even here, where genetic influences are ascertainable, the question of whether culture can and should attempt to augment, controvert, or ignore particular biological inheritances is left unanswered. While the existence of a genetic leash is evident, its specific length and level of elasticity are largely unknown. Moreover, the extent to which we should stretch it remains very much open to debate. We are genetically constrained to grow legs and arms rather than fins, wheels, or wings. That explains why humans walk or run to get places. But that does not mean that we should never swim, ride bicycles, or fly in airplanes. Humans are also genetically induced, owing to their bodies’ production of certain hormones and enzymes, to respond aggressively in threatening situations. Nonetheless, culture and politics frequently curb, manipulate, and sublimate these aggressive tendencies, and rightly so. Likewise, the fact that genetics has produced a historical legacy of female childrearing does not mean that women should remain the sole or even primary caretakers of children today. All cultural institutions, one might say, have genetic foundations. But these foundations are broad enough to allow the construction of very large and diverse moral and political structures within which humans find themselves at great liberty to roam. Each one of us has some 100,000–200,000 genes, composed of 6 billion nucleotides that form the letters of our genetic code. The amount of information stored in our brains, however, assuming for the sake of argument that it corresponds to the number of neural connections, is many thousands of times greater. (The brain is made up of 100 billion cells, each containing thousands of connections.)20 We may interpret these facts to mean that human beings are genetically destined to develop cultural mores and technical means that challenge and stretch their biological propensities and capacities. Indeed, the leash by which genes hold culture is so long and flexible that culture has become the greatest force structuring most human relationships and activities. The development of a political life is possible for humans and impossible for other animals for one simple reason: they do not have our genes. Our genes allow us, one might almost say they determine us, to structure our lives by mores. Political life is an agglomeration of mores. That these mores at times appear to conflict with primitive, unmediated instincts speaks less to the antagonism between nature and nurture than to the complex interdependence of human nature and human nurture. We are born genetically disposed to learn a great deal in this life and to alter our behavior according to this learning. Human culture develops not in opposition to human biology but as a consequence of it. To the extent that our genes determine our nature they determine us to be cultural beings whose cultural life is relatively autonomous. It is no less “natural” for human beings to restrain or channel their behavior according to moral standards or technological possibilities than it is for them
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to abandon themselves to unmediated instinct and undeveloped propensities. The mere existence of particular drives or physiological characteristics does not tell us very much about what human beings should (attempt to) do. Heeding ethical dictates is as natural as following appetites, at least for adult human beings who speak and reason together. Our genetic leash is sufficiently long to allow self-consciousness. Making use of our self-consciousness is no rebellion against our genes. If anything, a creature biologically designed for selfconsciousness that did not develop and adopt mores to regulate its life might be seen as the true rebel against nature. The fact that human genes constrain but do not determine the range and development of human activities and relationships makes for the dilemmas that we alone among the animal species face. These are the dilemmas of a political animal. Biological and Cultural Reproduction Human genes propagate themselves by way of the sexual reproduction of the individuals who possess them. Hence we carry on the genes of our parents, just as our children carry on our genes. Richard Dawkins, a zoologist, first suggested that genes had a cultural analog. He coined the word meme, from the Greek mimeme, which means “imitation,” to define a unit of culture that replicates itself.21 Memes, Dawkins suggests, serve as units of cultural transmission. Genetic transmission began billions of years ago in the primal soup of the earth’s cooling seas. Here DNA molecules first appeared and started to reproduce themselves. Eventually, these molecules combined to form the genes of basic organisms capable of reproduction. The diversity and sophistication of these primitive forms of life slowly increased, with each particular species bearing and reproducing its own unique “pool” of genes. The transmission of memes, in contrast, only began millions of years ago, when tribes of primitive hominids began to produce and pass along expressions, information, skills, rules, and rituals by way of gestures and speech. The conglomerations of memes that get passed along through cultural reproduction may be understood as “symbol pools” that correspond to the “gene pools” passed along through biological reproduction. Gene pools are programs for transforming energy and matter into organic life. Likewise, symbol pools may be understood as programs for transforming energy and matter into specific sorts of cultural life.22 Today we know a good deal about the chemistry that allows the genetic conversion of matter and energy into organic life. But what is the “chemistry” of cultural life? How, we might ask, do symbol pools maintain and transform themselves? In other words, how do memes reproduce? Memes propagate themselves through social interaction. As Dawkins writes, they leap “from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be
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called imitation. . . . When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.”23 In other words, when we speak or act in a way that influences others to speak or act in a similar way, we are effectively propagating a meme. A good example might be the coining of a new word that quickly becomes popular. Technological media (e.g., radio, television, newspapers, magazines, books, direct mail, and electronic print and images), dramatically increase the pace at which memes propagate. Indeed, a major advantage of memes over genes is the speed with which the former reproduce. This speed accounts for the growing comparative strength of culture over biology in the structuring of human relationships and activities. The propagation of memes may prove more successful than the propagation of genes for other reasons as well. Only half of each parent’s genes are passed on to a child. In turn, a grandchild carries on only one-fourth of a grandparent’s genes, and a great grandchild only one-eighth. This exponential decrease continues indefinitely, such that distant descendants are genetically little more related to us than complete strangers living on the other side of the globe. Our memes, in contrast, may survive relatively intact across countless generations. Dawkins explains that as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes [to your progeny] is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions. . . . But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today . . . but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates . . . are still going strong.24 Both memes and genes achieve a sort of immortality through their selfreplication. Unlike genes, however, certain memes survive down through the generations in their original forms. Socratic thought continues to be taught in thousands of university classrooms, and it continues to exert its effect on countless minds. One cannot claim the same sort of immortality for the genes that Socrates passed on to his children, which today are as scattered as dust in the wind. Over time, the replication of particular memes is likely to produce many mutations and hybrids. Indeed, when it comes to political theory, the most successful memes may be not those that faithfully duplicate themselves but those that stimulate the accelerated development of related yet altered versions of themselves over time. Here, as with genetic transmission, mutation remains at
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least as important as replication for the continuation and enrichment of life. If genes did not mutate over time, new species of animals would not develop that were better suited to their respective environments. Soon biological diversity would dwindle as new forms of life failed to develop while old forms continued to perish in the midst of environmental change. Likewise, memes that fail to adapt to a changing world may have quite limited life spans. Those that mutate successfully, in contrast, may exercise their influence over numerous generations. Again, Socratic thought comes to mind. As recorded by Plato, many of Socrates’ concepts and ideas remain with us today in a relatively intact form. Yet Socrates understood himself to be playing the role of the midwife, aiding in the birth not of particular thoughts but of particular ways of thinking. He produced a macro-meme known as the “Socratic method.” This is a method of teaching by means of posing probing questions. Though the Socratic method is still widely employed today, it often fosters memes that are quite different from those Plato recorded in his dialogues. Socrates’ own memes, in turn, have undergone countless mutations at the hands of his many interpreters. They have also experienced much cross-fertilization from other thinkers. Like political theories, memes often achieve their greatest influence not through faithful reproduction but through their capacity to stimulate adaptation and innovation. Indeed, a meme is perhaps most “alive” not when it is permanently etched in stone but when it serves as a parent or partner to the birth of new memes. A meme is simply a general case of what we have called a more. Whereas memes refer to any cultural transmission (including, say, technical inventions, artistic styles, and clothing fashions), mores refer more specifically to those concepts, conventions, principles, rules, and understandings that structure social order and political life. With this in mind, we might observe one final parallel between the biological and the cultural building blocks of life. Genes, like mores, influence but do not dictate how we think and act. Genes do not determine every aspect of our physiological and behavioral development. Instead, genes determine the boundaries or limits within which our physiological and behavioral attributes are at liberty to adapt to the environment. The genes that give us opposable thumbs, for instance, do not determine whether we should plant potatoes or use sickles to harvest grain. They do make these and many other activities possible. Were we endowed with paws or hooves instead, our range of adaptation to the environment, and the types of food we consume, would be much more limited. In describing the boundaries of adaptation with which each organism must contend, biologists use the term reaction range. A reaction range is the range within which an organism’s physical traits or behaviors may develop given a particular environment and the limitations imposed by its genetic inheritance.25 Genes that produce wings or fins do not determine what an animal will con-
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sume, but they do preclude its planting potatoes or using sickles to harvest grain. Genes that produce opposable thumbs allow a much larger reaction range. Nonetheless, the reaction range is still limited. Our having opposable thumbs on our hands precludes the great efficiency in swimming that is gained by having fins or the ability for unaided flight that is gained by having wings. Like genes, mores do not determine the specific behavior of individuals in particular situations. Rather, they delimit a range of adaptive behavior, inducing particular sorts of thought or action and inhibiting others. Mores produce a certain cultural reaction range within which people who adopt these mores are predisposed to operate. We cannot say exactly how someone influenced by Platonic mores is likely to think or act in any particular situation. Yet we can foresee that someone who adopts a Platonic conception of human nature is unlikely to advocate a Hobbesian style of politics. The Platonic valorization of philosophic reasoning is incompatible with the rule of a despot having no philosophic training or knowledge. Plato’s concept of the three-part human soul with reason ruling the emotions and appetites has produced cultural mores that have lasted more than 2,500 years. These mores continue to reproduce themselves today, effectively leaping from brain to brain through the media of books and lectures. Individuals who adopt these mores will tend to interact with their political environment within a particular reaction range of thought and behavior. Of course, even a dyed-in-the-wool Platonist may change his mind and become a Hobbesian thinker or actor. Alternatively, one might combine Plato and Hobbes to arrive at a hybridized set of mores that somehow integrates these two conceptual universes. In short, the human capacities for freedom of thought and freedom of will, barring cases of complete brainwashing or indoctrination, preclude the possibility of particular sets of mores exerting total control over the lives of those who adopt them. The sorts of mores systematized in political theories generally do not prescribe or proscribe specific thoughts or actions. Instead, they set out bounded conceptual fields within which collective human existence may be examined and evaluated. The mores of a political theory, developed through the use of various conceptual lenses, sketch out the features of an epistemological and ethical reaction range. These mores influence the types of thought and behavior that individuals acknowledge or ignore and accept or reject as laudable, tolerable, and sanctionable within political life. Hobbes was certainly aware of the importance of the mores that political theorists develop and advance. These mores, grounded in language, channel our thinking and acting. Hobbes thus proposed an extensive streamlining of language along the lines suggested by his geometrically grounded thinking. The effort to settle the definitions of words and stabilize the meanings of concepts
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was no mere academic affair. It was, Hobbes held, the only basis for a stable social and political life. It required an all-powerful Leviathan who could enforce the proper use of language. Theorists do not have Leviathans at their disposal to settle the meanings and uses of words once and for all. Competing political mores—the concepts, conventions, principles, rules, and understandings that constitute the stuff of political theory—will always be found in abundance, at least wherever freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press exist. Platonic mores and their Hobbesian counterparts are only two of countless rivals doing battle on theory’s field of honor. It is unlikely that any theoretical victories won in this realm will be complete or permanent. Theorists have no way of assuring that their mores will be faithfully reproduced and proliferate. Often their mores will be used in quite unanticipated ways. There is, in short, no end in sight to the ongoing theoretical struggles waged for the hearts and minds of citizens. The competition is stiff—and that is a good thing. For any end to the epistemological and ethical struggles to understand, order, and transform political life would also be the end of human creativity and freedom. Despite the intense competition, particular theories do come to exert considerable influence over time. Some even become hegemonic. They may replicate mores, or stimulate the evolutionary development of these mores, across numerous lands and generations. The stakes for political theorists, therefore, are quite high. In their attempt to understand, order, and transform collective human existence, theorists have the opportunity to bear many intellectual and moral offspring. Those who yearn for immortality might find the practice of political theory a more effective means of satisfying this ambition than the standard genetic route. Epistemological and ethical legacies may endure long after the theorists who bequeath them have “shuffled off this mortal coil,” to employ Hamlet’s brooding phrase. The fact that a political theory may have its greatest effect once its creator has passed from this world underlines the awesome responsibility taken on by those who theorize politics. Suggested Readings Thomas Aquinas. The Political Ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics and Politics Larry Arnhart. Darwinian Natural Right St. Augustine. The Political Writings Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene Daniel Dennett. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
the question of human nature
Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan Melvin Konner. The Tangled Wing Roger D. Masters. The Nature of Politics Thomas Paine. The Rights of Man Plato. Republic Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War
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chapter 3
Politics, Power, and the Public Good POLITICS IS OFTEN defined as the art and science of government. Government
refers to the institutions and processes through which binding decisions are made for a society. Politics, then, pertains to the means employed to organize and regulate collective human existence. Politics is found everywhere that humans are found. No areas of human life are completely beyond its reach or wholly untouched by its effects. To say that there are few if any areas of human life unaffected by politics, however, is not to say that everything is or should be political in the same way or to the same degree. Politics pertains to the organization and regulation of communities of distinct individuals. As individuals, we maintain private lives. We hold that certain realms of our lives are not appropriately subject to political control. They are personal affairs, properly conducted between and evaluated among friends and family. Likewise, we hold that certain matters ought to remain subject only to individual conscience and personal choice, not open to public scrutiny, debate, or interference. In countries where government is grounded on liberal principles and constitutional order, these areas of private concern are often protected by a bill of rights. If there are matters that are and should remain private, how can we say that politics is pervasive? The answer to this question is straightforward: politics largely determines what realms of human affairs can and will remain private. It is politics, moreover, that safeguards these realms, effectively guarding them from its own intrusions. The constitutional rights that protect the privacy of individuals and families from state interference, for example, were themselves created through political processes and are maintained through political institutions. Individual rights to privacy, in this sense, are political rights. Like the constitution in which they are embedded, rights to privacy are politically decided, politically instituted, and politically preserved. Civil liberties, the freedom from governmental interference enjoyed by individuals, have government as their guarantor. Politics is pervasive because it is involved in creating and maintaining the separate yet interrelated spheres of human affairs. Politics is pervasive not
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only because it brings many concerns into the public realm but because it determines what things are to remain, as much as possible, shielded from the public realm. Take the issue of religious freedom. Freedom of religion, at least in modern, liberal states, is an important civil liberty. In states where religious freedom is maintained, if, how, what, or whom one chooses to worship remains a matter of individual conscience. The political community neither promotes religious dogma nor prescribes religious ritual. There remains, as it is commonly known, a separation of church and state, which means that an individual is allowed to practice any religion as long as this practice does not interfere unduly with the lives of others. A religion that called for forced conversion of infidels or the burning of heretics, for instance, would be politically intolerable. Here the church would be encroaching on a prerogative uniquely held by the state in modern times, namely, the use of physical force to protect its citizens or defend its interests. Many political communities of the past were theocratic, that is, they were governed by rulers who claimed to be the vicars or representatives of a deity or deities. Typically, this meant that the head of state was also the high priest of an officially maintained religion. Even today, fundamentalist religious leaders and parties have gained political power in certain countries and maintain various forms of theocratic rule. In the United States, as in many other countries, the separation of church and state is explicitly maintained by a constitution that sets out the structure and boundaries of political life. When the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, however, only two states—New York and Virginia—did not have religious qualifications for public office. Most of the other states required that one be a Protestant to hold office. The separation of church and state is itself a historical, political achievement. Without politics, the safeguarding of private realms of life from politics would be impossible. Economic freedom is also an important right in modern societies. It allows us to hold private property and to engage in financial enterprises of our own choosing. Like religious freedom, economic freedom is a crucial aspect of individual freedom and autonomy. Like religious affairs, economic affairs in modern, liberal states remain privatized to a great extent. And, like religious freedom, economic freedom has its limits, which are politically established and maintained through laws, regulations, and customs. Economic freedom allows us to earn and spend money in many different ways. Nonetheless, our economic transactions must not interfere unduly with the rights and freedoms of others. We may not spend money in any way we want. It is illegal, for instance, to buy a slave. Nor can one legally buy votes. In many countries, there are also strict limits on the amount of media coverage and advertising that one can buy to run a campaign for election to public office. Similarly, the ways one may earn money are restricted. Wealth must be gained
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in some legitimate fashion rather than by means of fraud or extortion. Likewise, one may manufacture goods to be sold for profit, but one cannot sell anything one wants or manufacture things in any way one wants. One cannot legally sell contaminated food, or dangerously pollute the land, air, or water during the processes of manufacturing. Goods manufactured and sold must truly be goods, that is, they must not obviously harm the consumer or the public domain. These restrictions on economic affairs are necessary to ensure that economic rights and freedoms do not overstep their boundaries. They must not interfere unduly with the enjoyment of other rights and freedoms. Establishing and maintaining these boundaries between potentially conflicting rights is a collective enterprise that entails the issuing of regulations, the making of laws, and the crafting and maintaining of constitutions. It is, in short, a matter of politics. Politics structures our lives by supplying the scope and limits of our activities and relationships. Likewise, political theory structures politics by supplying its conceptual and normative scope and limits. Our effort to theorize politics, then, is no mere academic affair. Understanding the meaning of politics is crucial to understanding the way we lead our lives, including those aspects of our lives that we justifiably presume to be largely beyond the purview of politics. According to Aristotle, the study of politics does not allow for the level of certainty, exactitude, or generalization that might be gained through natural or mathematical sciences such as physics or geometry. Despite this apparent shortcoming, Aristotle maintains that the study of politics is the master science. His reasoning is straightforward. Politics orders the social realm as a whole, allotting diverse activities and relationships their proper places and prerogatives. Though politics does not determine how every human endeavor, such as religious worship, economic enterprise, artistic creation, or philosophical reflection, is to proceed within its legitimate borders, politics does demarcate the appropriate boundaries of these endeavors. Political theory is an intellectual and moral effort to identify and justify these boundaries. What is the most recent political event that you have witnessed? In order to answer this question, you have to make some pretty fine distinctions. You have to distinguish between numerous recently witnessed events, throwing out of contention all those activities that fail to meet certain (yet unnamed) criteria, singling out others, and finally choosing the one that best fits the bill. Even if you have never thought about the definition of politics before today, your ability to respond to the question demonstrates a tacit knowledge of its meaning. Perhaps you responded to the question by saying that you recently observed an electoral rally or a congressional session in person or on television. That seems a safe bet. But what if someone responded by saying that the most recent political event she had witnessed was not some action engaged in by legislators,
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candidates, or voters, but an extended discussion by students in a classroom, or a varsity basketball game? You might disagree with this person’s understanding of politics. But how would you argue that the words and actions that occur in the classroom or on the basketball court are less political than those that occur in Congress or at an electoral rally? When one thinks about politics explicitly, tacit understandings may begin to unravel. Clear and concise definitions of politics are neither easy to come by nor easy to defend. If you picked a congressional session as the best example of a political event, then you chose something commonly assumed to evidence the essence of politics, namely, the use of public power. More precisely, politics might be defined as an exercise of power that influences people to pursue particular objectives or adopt particular norms that direct or order their collective lives. But does not the power of persuasion exercised in the classroom also bear this potential? And do not the basketball players agree to follow rules and procedures that regulate their common endeavor? It seems that we must theorize some more about the meaning of politics. Power and Force The history of politics is the history of the efforts of individuals or groups of individuals to accumulate, exercise, and distribute power. Hence questions of power figure largely into the discussion of most, if not all, other political concepts. The question, Who should wield power? is the question of leadership or rule. The question, How should power be (institutionally) distributed? investigates the best form of polity or government. The question, How can power be exercised fairly? describes the problem of justice. The question, What should the limits of power be? introduces the issues of individual liberty and civil rights. Politics, first and foremost, is about power. Political theory, it follows, is the study of the nature of power—of the uses, effects, and limits of power. Reflecting on the importance of power to the study of politics and society, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) wrote that the fundamental concept of social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. Like energy, power has many forms, such as wealth, armaments, civil authority, influence or opinion. No one of these can be regarded as subordinate to any other, and there is no one form from which the others are derivative. . . . To revert to the analogy of physics: power, like energy, must be regarded as continually passing from any one of its forms into any other, and it should be the business of social science to seek the laws of such transformations.1
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Power, for Russell, is defined as the capacity to produce intended effects. It is, in short, the ability to get what one wants. Figuring out how people get what they want, individually and collectively, is the job of social scientists. In like fashion, Thomas Hobbes wrote that “the power of a Man (to take it Universally) is his present means to obtain some future apparent good.”2 Hobbes speaks of different sorts of power, including bodily power or strength, which is the physical means one has to move heavy objects and obtain some apparent good by doing so. Our present concerns, however, are not with strength or other sorts of physical power. We are concerned with power as it is manifest in political life. Like Russell, we are interested in power as the fundamental concept pertaining to the study of political society. This sort of social and political power may take many forms, which, while conceptually distinguishable, often operate in conjunction. Power is generally thought of as “power over,” as a kind of control over the decisions people make and the choices they have. One exercises power by influencing people to do, say, believe, or value particular things. This may happen in many different ways. One may pay them (the power of wealth), win them over in speech (the power of eloquence), appeal to their sense of duty or rightful obedience (the power of authority), rely on one’s reputation (the power of prestige), exercise the prerogative to carry on a legacy (the power of tradition), or intimidate them (the power of coercion). Each of these forms of power—wealth, eloquence, authority, prestige, tradition, and coercion—has its own limitations. The power of rational debate and persuasion typically displays its limits once battle lines have been drawn and active hostilities have begun. Wealth, in turn, may get you much of what you want in this world. As the saying goes, however, you can’t buy love. Love must be won and sustained in other ways. Most often, the limits of one form of power are established in confrontation with other forms of power. Hence a popular musician may influence thousands of people to drink a particular brand of soda. Yet her fame or prestige may be quite ineffective when marshaled to promote certain ethical views. In ethical debate, rational persuasion, the power of tradition, or the influence of moral authority may prove more effective. Many political theorists believe that force is one form of power. Some suggest that violent force, as evidenced in military action, for example, is the ultimate form of power. There are good reasons for accepting this definition. It enjoys a wide currency and a long tradition of usage. One commonly speaks, for instance, of the power of might. And every political regime that has ever existed, to the best of our knowledge, has relied on some form of force to maintain order. It is important to recognize that political power bears an intimate relationship to force. At the same time, it is useful to distinguish between these two concepts. Thomas Hobbes, adopting the tough-minded orientation of political realism, insists that violence is the natural and ultimate expression of political
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power. His reason is that promulgation of the rules, regulations, and laws needed to order collective life does little in itself to secure the peace unless these rules, regulations, and laws are backed by the threat of force. Some form of punishment for lawbreakers and transgressors is necessary. Covenants without swords, Hobbes tersely remarks, are mere words. The Florentine political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527 maintains that good politics ensue from good laws. Yet Machiavelli, who along with Hobbes established modern realism, goes on to insist that “there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms.” Force, for Machiavelli, always lurks in the shadows of politics. Indeed, he believed that it was often necessary for leaders to create a show of force. Machiavelli therefore advises a ruler or prince to become feared by his subjects.3 For better or worse, political rulers often employ force to back up their power. They also generally deny that option to others. Max Weber proposed that the modern state is best defined as that political entity having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence or force. All modern states, and most other forms of national or imperial government throughout history, have claimed the exclusive prerogative to exercise force within their borders. This prerogative is generally justified as the only viable means to secure internal peace. (In the seventeenth century, for example, King Louis XIII of France forbade dueling in order to consolidate state power, that is, to gain a monopoly on the use of force.) States also claim the prerogative to exercise force beyond their borders in order to defend against aggressors or to secure national interests. As one theorist of state power observed, “what each state forbids its citizens to do to one another, all states must stand in readiness to do to each other.”4 Today, as in times past, most political power remains backed up by the force of arms. With the exception of pacifists, people generally consider the use of force by political rulers legitimate in principle, as a means to secure internal peace and defend against foreign threats. In practice, however, the use of force by governments is usually subject to criticism or condemnation from some quarter, and often for good reason. Governmental abuse of the prerogative to employ force is an all-too-common affair. This is true not just in the waging of war or the commission of other acts of aggression against foreign nations. Deadly force and violence are often wielded by states within their own borders, against their own citizens. In fact, governments in the past century have killed over three times as many of their own citizens (for political reasons, that is, excluding nonpolitical, criminal executions) as they have killed foreign combatants in war.5 Violence and political power are certainly no strangers. Force, Hobbes and Machiavelli declared, was necessary to back up the rule of law. The power to legislate rests on the power to coerce. While we might deplore its abuses, the threat of force remains an intrinsic part of political life. It has even been suggested that political theories that do not take into account the need for force are not political theories at all. Robert Dahl criticizes anarchists
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on this score. In their effort to safeguard the independence and autonomy of individuals, anarchists argue that all coercion within the political realm is illegitimate. They consequently advocate the abolition of government. The abolition of government, Dahl maintains, means an end to politics, and an end to political theory. The word anarchism first appeared during the French Revolution. It was employed to characterize those who opposed the heavy-handed rule of the Jacobins and argued for the formation of communes. The French social theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) revived the term in 1840, though most of his followers preferred to describe themselves as “mutualists.” In the early 1870s, while struggling with the disciples of Karl Marx for the heart and soul of the First International Workingman’s Association, the Russian thinker and activist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) proudly embraced the term anarchism and developed its principles. Much in keeping with the ideas of Proudhon and Bakunin, the well-known American anarchist Emma Goldman (1869–1940) defined anarchism as “the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.”6 Anarchy literally means the absence of rule. It is based on the utopian hope that in the absence of rulers, people will still lead peaceable, social lives. These lives would be blessed with greater freedom and happiness than could be achieved through the institution of a coercive government. According to Dahl, the denial of the legitimacy of law and force makes “anarchism . . . not so much a political philosophy as a moral doctrine.”7 Dahl is effectively embracing Weber’s famous distinction between the “ethic of responsibility” that is appropriate for political affairs and the “ethic of ultimate ends” that pertains to matters of conscience. The ethic of ultimate ends holds that good intentions are of paramount concern in judging the rightness of actions and that the unintended ramifications of good actions may be ignored. The ethic of responsibility, in contrast, gives an account of and takes responsibility for the “foreseeable results of one’s action.” The ethic of responsibility also regretfully accepts the fact that, to achieve good ends, “one must be willing to pay the price of using morally dubious means or at least dangerous ones.”8 The use of force is considered by Dahl and Weber to be the dangerous but necessary means to protect civil liberties and social order. The option of employing force is part of an ethic of responsibility, and such an ethic is intrinsic to political life. To insist that a theory of politics cannot ignore the need for force to back up the rule of law is not to say that politics amounts to the rule of the strong and the law of the jungle. Force and violence should not be equated with politics. Nonetheless, force and violence effectively demarcate the boundaries of the political realm. Politics, whose essence is power, concerns the control of force as well as its legitimation. In other words, politics (and power) ends where force
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and violence begin. Yet most forms of political life—certainly all national forms—would never arise and could not persist unless the threat of force was at hand. “What we should consider as unique to political power, as conceptually intrinsic to it,” Gianfranco Poggi observes, “is control over the means of violence, rather than the direct and frequent recourse to their employment.”9 Along with Weber, Poggi maintains that control of the means of violence is a defining characteristic of a political regime. The extent to which a regime must frequently rely on the actual use of force, however, demonstrates its political weakness. Well functioning states generate economic incentives and build upon common values to maintain order, strengthen community and achieve prosperity. That is to say, they engage multiple forms of political power to achieve their goals. In the absence of underlying coercive apparatuses, however, such political power could not sustain itself. Political theories must account for this complex relationship between political power and force. With this goal in mind, we now explore a particular understanding of power, one that is well established among political theorists. Power influences, but does not force. We may thus define power to include any means of intentionally influencing people short of physically forcing them to comply with one’s wishes. The matter is confusing because nonviolent forms of influence may be so compelling that they seem to constitute a kind of force. The power of wealth, for instance, when used to influence the actions of the desperately poor, may prove virtually irresistible. The power of authority, when unquestioned, may be overwhelming. Of course, intimidation, in the form of a coercive threat, explicitly flirts with force. If these forms of power can be so unyielding, one might ask, then why should the compulsion of actual force not also be considered a form of power? The answer is that understanding power as distinct from force allows us to define politics in terms of power while discriminating between regimes that are more or less political in nature. Power rather than force is wielded if the object of influence retains an option for resistance or refusal that is not met with a direct threat to life or limb. Power does not destroy or deny the freedom of the individual over whom it is exercised, though power may and often does make the exercise of freedom more difficult or dangerous. If I shackle someone to a wall to keep her from voting in an election, then I am not exerting a form of power. I am simply exerting force. The individual’s potential for effective resistance has been destroyed and her freedom has been wholly denied. In contrast, if I persuade this person not to vote, arguing that her vote will not make any difference to the outcome of the election, then I have exercised power. But what if I am a rich landowner to whom a peasant family is heavily indebted and I announce that it would greatly displease me were anyone to vote or otherwise participate in an upcoming election. To be consistent with our
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definition, we must say that the landowner is exercising power, specifically the power of coercion. The peasants, unlike the person shackled to the wall, retain the option of ignoring the intimidating threat, casting their ballots in spite of it, and awaiting the hinted-at reprisals. Admittedly, the line drawn between force and the power of coercion in this case is very thin and would be of little consolation to the intimidated peasants. But the distinction remains important. At times, however, the line drawn between force and power all but disappears. If I persuade you to hand over your wallet by pointing a loaded gun at your head, you remain at liberty to retain your wallet (for the moment) and pay the consequences. However, the threat of violence is clear and imminent in this situation. Thus we are justified in interpreting such a threat not as a form of coercive power but as an exercise of force. Once power gains enough coercive strength to deny all effective forms of (nonviolent) resistance or refusal, as it may through the cultivation of intense fear for one’s life or limb, it effectively ceases to be power. To remain a form of power, influence must meet with resistance, understood as a competing form of power. Once power effectively destroys all competing forms of power, that is, once power denies freedom altogether, it is transformed into force. Hobbes considered the use of violence by rulers legitimate because everyone has an interest in internal peace and external security. This peace and security could not be assured without a Leviathan threatening the use of force and occasionally employing it. For Hobbes, the ruler can be said to rule in the public interest simply by meeting the minimum requirement of preventing a war of all against all. Consequently, Hobbes argues that the sovereign can never be justly punished in any way for any acts he commits. He cannot commit injustice or unjustly injure his subjects. In becoming sovereign ruler he gains the right and authority to do whatever he wills. In creating the Leviathan, Hobbes maintains, each subject explicitly states: “I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe to this Man.” This act of submission, carried out simultaneously by all, unites the multitude of actors milling about the state of nature into a single commonwealth. The Leviathan is considered a “Mortall God” to whom its subjects owe their lives and allegiance.10 King James I of England (1566–1625) took this sort of claim quite seriously, though he had a religious, as opposed to pragmatic, Hobbesian justification for his own despotic reign. If confronted by unjust and tyrannical rule, James states, “the people may do no other than flee unresistingly from the anger of its king; its tears and sighs are the only answer to him allowed it, and it may summon none but God to its aid.”11 A king has a divine right to rule, James was saying. This rule is absolute and should meet with no resistance whatsoever. Few people today accept James’s defense of absolute monarchy on religious grounds. Most would also argue that Hobbes’s legitimation of sovereign power
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and violence goes too far and that his understanding of common interests or the public good is too narrow. Ruling for the public good requires more than the mere prevention of anarchy or war. Establishing basic order is a necessary condition for good government, but it is not a sufficient condition. Tyrannies may be very orderly states, but they are not very political ones. That is because tyranny is a form of rule grounded in violence rather than power.12 Tyrants rule by force. They deny their subjects any sort of meaningful resistance short of armed revolt. The difference between tyranny and more political forms of rule is that tyranny denies people the opportunity to influence the organization and regulation of collective life. In short, tyrants do not acknowledge their subjects as individuals capable of exercising power for the public good. The tension between the individual and the community that is the essence of politics is absent in tyrannies because the political freedom of the individual is denied. Just as force is seldom if ever wholly absent from political rule, so politics is seldom if ever wholly absent from rule by force. Machiavelli, who legitimated the rule of a strong prince, acknowledged that force alone cannot adequately sustain political rule. Hence Machiavelli counsels the prince not only to cultivate respect by instilling fear but also to seek the love and avoid the hatred of his subjects whenever possible. This latter task is best achieved when the prince abides by his own laws. Even in the most despotic regime, power is still exercised through the influence of wealth, eloquence, authority, prestige, tradition, or intimidation. That is to say, tyrannies remain political regimes in certain respects. Even in the case of an absolute tyranny, where force and violence, rather than power and compliance, best characterize the relation of the ruler to the public, the relation of the ruler to his small coterie of advisers, bodyguards, and elite backers generally remains political in large degree. Power, not force, for example, typically holds violent oppressors together as a group, whether this group is a street gang or an authoritarian government. Thus politics percolates through even the most violent forms of rule. Perhaps only in such places of pure violence as concentration camps is the opportunity for politics completely extinguished. While order might be established and maintained through force alone, other aspects of the public good, such as individual freedom, can be established and maintained only through the exercise of power. Too much freedom leads to anarchy. Too much order leads to tyranny. What the correct balance between order and freedom should be is the topic of ongoing debate. Different forms of political rule offer more order or more freedom, depending on their nature. Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), a French political philosopher, argued that monarchical states place more value on order, while republican states place more value on freedom. Similarly, Plato argued that democracy raises the pursuit of freedom to the highest level and enshrines it as its first principle. By Plato’s
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reckoning, however, democracy’s infatuation with freedom leads to intolerable breakdowns in social order. Plato prefers the monarchical rule of philosopher kings. The Nature of Political Power To exercise power is not necessarily to secure one’s interests at the expense of others. Nor does one’s exercise of power always constitute a threat or diminution of another’s power. Many theorists, including Hobbes and Weber, assume that the exercise of power is a “zero-sum game.” They believe that any increase in the power held by one person means a decrease in power held by another, with the net sum always being zero. Other political theorists, such as Hannah Arendt, insist that cooperative activity—acting in concert—constitutes an exercise of power wherein influence is reciprocally exercised and interests are mutually served. As social order is established, mutual influence grows, and so does power. While this growth of power is seldom shared in an egalitarian manner, it certainly need not be zero-sum. Cooperation begets a positive-sum game of power. If cooperation ceases to be a form of mutual accommodation and becomes instead a complete convergence of interests and ideas, then the exercise of power stops. That is to say, power that encounters no resistance whatsoever ceases to remain power. In the complete absence of resistance, where all intentions and desires literally converge, influence becomes unnecessary, and in the absence of influence, power disappears. A state of harmony exists instead. Such harmony between individuals seldom arises and never endures. In the political realm, which is defined by its plurality of unique individuals, the full convergence of interests is impossible. Even within particular social classes, political parties, or special-interest groups, ideas, opinions, and concerns vary. Collective harmony is an inspiring ideal. Perhaps it is occasionally achieved between musicians playing in concert, or between lovers engulfed in mutual desire. It is never fully realized among citizens. Indeed, even musicians achieve their harmonic interaction only by following the authoritative lead of a conductor who interprets the music in particular ways and shapes their playing to accommodate this interpretation. And romantically entwined couples face the inevitability of “lovers’ quarrels,” which painfully demonstrate that interests, ideas, and understandings only ever achieve a temporary unity. Whenever we adjust our attitudes, beliefs, or actions owing to the intentional influence of others, even when this adjustment may serve our own interests or purposes, the exercise of power has occurred. For the most part, the exercise of power is not wholly mutual and interests are seldom equally served. Most people seek to provide for their own interests—or the interests of their kith
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and kin—first and foremost. In a world of scarce resources, this concern for selfinterest breeds competition and conflict. Indeed, politics might be viewed as bounded conflict, as a means of managing conflict such that it does not deteriorate into private feuding or mob violence. The attempt to manage conflict brings individuals, and groups of individuals (political parties), into a competitive quest for power. This quest for power stimulates public debate and discussion not only about the rules and procedures for allocating resources but also about the very nature, meaning, and purpose of the political process itself. The political use of power, in this respect, is a self-defining activity. As E. E. Schattschneider observes, “Political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power; the antagonists can rarely agree on what the issues are because power is involved in the definition. He who determines what politics is about runs the country, because the definition of the alternatives is the choice of conflicts, and the choice of conflicts allocates power.”13 Schattschneider observes a fundamental feature of political life. It is not simply a matter of winning debates. It is a matter of determining the terms of debates. Political power allows one to define issues, control agendas, and choose one’s battles. Politics is a self-defining means of managing conflict. Conflict is inherent to politics. But so is cooperation. Indeed, politics might be defined as the task of mustering cooperation and managing conflict in collective life. For this reason, politics has been called the art of compromise. The political actor accepts limitations to conflict in order to avert violence. Likewise, the political actor, aware of the impossibility of harmony, makes concessions and adjustments in order to achieve cooperation. Through the exercise of power, political actors foster cooperation and limit conflict. Power is the capacity to influence people to pursue particular objectives or adopt particular norms. It follows that power is not just any form of influence. I have not exercised power if I get hit by a truck while running across a busy highway and my (bad) example influences a fellow pedestrian to wait for the green light before crossing. My affecting the actions and redirecting the intentions of another person is evident. But my influence was unintentional. At the same time, a parent who demands of her child never to run across a busy highway, and in so doing influences her child’s behavior, is indeed exercising a form of power. We might say, then, that power is the capacity to influence people according to some design. To influence someone means to get someone to do something that she would not otherwise do. I am not exercising power, for instance, if I stand in front of the gymnasium and suggest to people entering that they engage in some form of physical activity. That was already their intent. I have not affected their
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behavior. Then again, I might persuade my colleagues to join me in a game of basketball by extolling the virtues of the sport. Regardless of whether they enjoy the game or not—even if they enjoy it and benefit from it more than I do—I have exerted some form of power over them. Without my asking, they would not have played at all. Politics is about power and power is about influence. Whenever you have people in contact with each other, the exchange of influence arises. Hence politics is pervasive to the extent that we share a collective existence; for in our collective lives we inevitably adjust and react to each other’s needs, requests, and demands. Not all forms of influence, however, constitute exercises of power— unintentional influences do not count. Likewise, not all exercises of power are political—power that does not affect our public life is not political. Indeed, a good portion of political power is devoted to the effort to ensure that other forms of power, such as that exercised by religious leaders, do not exceed the appropriate boundaries of private life. Only power can limit power, and political power is constantly involved in determining and reestablishing the appropriate limits of nonpolitical forms of power. Nonpolitical power, in turn, is constantly testing these limits and frequently transgressing them. This means that almost any intentional exercise of influence can be considered political (to some degree) whenever it establishes, affirms, tests, or transgresses the boundaries of public life. In the end, the difference between power that is political and power that is not political is less a difference in kind than a difference in degree. Even such private affairs as parent-child relationships are marginally political. They are political, first, because the privacy of the relationship itself is politically maintained. They are political, second, because the effects of private power are almost always of some public concern. To return to our previous example: the parent demanding caution from the child crossing the street is instilling values of respect both for (parental) authority and the (traffic) law. This fostering of respect for authority and law impinges on the larger realm of politics. One might also suggest that public safety is inherently political. The collision of a child with an automobile may cause other accidents, involving other motorists. It would also bring into service the police and certain medical professionals or institutions that are maintained at public expense. Indeed, if the costs of health care are partially born by the state, then on this ground alone anything we do to endanger our health becomes a political issue. It so happens that one-third of the medical costs of tending to motor vehicle injuries is paid by taxpayers.14 This fact has been used to justify the promulgation of seat-belt and motorcycle helmet laws, which restrict one’s freedom to act in a way that seemingly endangers only oneself. Likewise, our use of public highways or schools or any other part of the infrastructure provided by the modern
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state, just as our having a job and hence contributing to the state’s coffers through taxation, is to some degree political in nature. The process of expanding the realm of politics to include almost any action that involves or has the potential to involve public institutions, public services, or other citizens underlines the complex interplay of our social relations. At the same time, this conceptual expansion of the realm of politics has a cost. If everything we do were to be considered equally political, the word politics would cease to do any useful work. There would be nothing to distinguish political phenomena from any other activities or events. Politics would mean little more than something of human concern. It is of utmost importance, therefore, to determine what things are more and less political. Hence we must discriminate between different forms of power. The Public Realm and the Private Realm Politics is about how the power employed to order collective life is accumulated, exercised, and distributed. Most generally put, we may say that politics is about power that is primarily public rather than private in its exercise and in its ends. The word private does not refer only to personal or familial affairs. Many interactions and transactions that take place outside the walls of our homes and involve large numbers of people are in fact predominantly private affairs. Most business transactions and religious ceremonies, for instance, are private in the same sense that most family discussions are private: none primarily involves or concerns the general public. Less political than the building of a city hall or a mass transit system, then, is a business transaction to form a private club or construct a private dwelling. Here the distinction between ends that are private and ends that are public is evident. Nonetheless, most private business affairs intersect with public concerns. Public officials, for instance, become involved in the issuing of the zoning permits, the enforcement of building codes, and the levying of tax assessments for private dwellings. Indeed, most if not all business engagements and exercises in household management are inextricably linked to public affairs. The energy consumed, the air or water pollution created, and the trash generated by the very acts of living our private lives or carrying out business in the modern world have become legitimate issues of public concern. Only the inhabiting of a cave by a hermit in an unpopulated hinterland might remain wholly beyond political concern, assuming that the hermit left no dependents at home to become wards of the state and did not disturb any endangered wildlife. In an increasingly populated and ecologically precarious world, few activities or affairs do not in some way affect the lives of others. The general rule of thumb, then, is the more an activity or affair reflects, addresses, or impinges on the collective existence of the
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citizenry as a whole, the more political it is. The more public the exercise or ends of power, the more that power is political. An example of power that is wholly public in its exercise is an open forum or debate. Here anyone may participate in the processes of influencing and persuading people to adopt a certain agenda, proposal, or point of view. This form of power—rational persuasion in open discussion—is eminently public in its form. An example of power that is eminently public in its ends would be the effort of citizens to establish a law, build a city hall, create a mass transit system, or gather a volunteer fire brigade. This form of power, oriented to the use or creation of civic institutions, is wholly public in its content. Its substantive product—the newly established law, city hall, mass transit system, or volunteer fire brigade—will serve the needs of the community as a whole. In the example of open debate, the public nature of power is most evident in the kind of influence that is employed. In the example of the creation of laws or other civic institutions, the public nature of power is most evident in the object or goal of influence, that is to say, its end product. The most political event of all, one might then suggest, is one that evidences the public use of power in its form as well as its content. An example might be an open, public debate about the need to institute a law or create some other institution designed to serve the public good. The public use of power, however, need not take the form of open debate to which all are invited. Political debates are more often restricted to elected representatives. Indeed, a very attenuated form of public power may take place in the absence of all debate, by way of the public’s compliance (or noncompliance) with laws. To act in accordance with the laws or the constitution of a state is, in some minimal sense, to participate in politics. In effect, one is influencing the lawmakers and upholders of the constitution to carry on business as usual. When laws or constitutions are too frequently ignored, disobeyed, or subverted, rulers must respond in some way, either by changing the laws or constitution, by engaging in greater public education, or by enforcing the laws or constitution more strictly or repressively. Compliance or submission to laws, then, remains a mitigated form of the public exercise of power. It is, of course, not a particularly democratic form of political participation, but it is not, for that reason, insignificant. The English philosopher and political theorist John Locke (1632–1704) suggested that citizens “consent” to their rulers and become obligated to their governments simply by inhabiting the territory they do, by using its roads and observing its laws. This passive public compliance or tacit consent is not to be equated with submission to brute force. Whenever citizens’ compliance with laws or subjection to rule is achieved through violence alone or the cultivation of intense fear with little or no potential for nonviolent resistance or refusal, we are justified in saying that public power and hence politics has ebbed to the point of nonexistence.
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The more public the exercise and ends of power, the more political the form of rule. Tyranny, the violent and arbitrary rule of a single individual, is therefore a less political form of rule than is monarchy (the rule of a king or queen), aristocracy, or oligarchy (the rule of a select few), and democracy (the rule of the people as a whole). This statement is true for two reasons. First, as Aristotle observed, what distinguishes the king from the tyrant or despot is that the tyrant rules only in his own interest, while the king has the public good in mind. The king’s serving the public good makes monarchical rule at least minimally political in its ends. Second, as ancient Greek thinkers also maintained, the king, unlike the tyrant, is expected to consult with his subjects, or at least their representative leaders and elite members. He is not supposed to rule arbitrarily. The king’s solicitation and heeding of public opinion makes monarchical rule at least minimally political in its exercise. What differentiates the monarch from the tyrant, then, is that the latter’s rule is based solely on his subjects’ surrender to force, while the former’s rule, though also absolute, is based on his subjects’ compliance with power. Of course, a king or autocrat, like any other political ruler, may deceive the public into believing that he rules in their interest, all the while filling his own coffers. Yet even such deception constitutes a mitigated form of politics. By succeeding in his deception, the political ruler escapes the need to rule by violence alone. By no means is political power always benign or good. Nonetheless, political power is always distinguishable from sheer force and hence is susceptible to public influence and solicitous of public compliance. The aim of tyrannical rule, political theorist Bernard Crick writes, is “to prevent the formation of a ‘public.’ For palace politics is private politics, almost a contradiction in terms. The unique character of political activity lies, quite literally, in its publicity.”15 Indeed, the word politics derives from the Greek politica, which means that pertaining to the polis, or city-state. To be political is to be of concern to the public citizen, or polites. When the Romans translated the works of Greek political theorists, they settled on the words res publica, or republic, to denote the political realm. The res publica literally means the “public thing” or “public affair.” Likewise, the word commonwealth, often considered synonymous with republic, refers to that which pertains to the public good or, in Old English, the common weal. Politics is a form of life preoccupied with the public good. There is a great irony in today’s pejorative use of the word politics. Presidents and legislators often speak of the need to end “politics as usual.” Likewise, citizens derisively criticize the “political interests” pursued by holders of public office. By political interests is meant either the private interests of (a few colluding) individuals or narrow partisan interests. These deprecatory uses of politics and political represent a complete reversal of the etymological meaning of the terms. Rather than suggest a concern for the public good as a whole,
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politics and political now connote a complete lack of such concern. This reversal of meanings has a long history. Abraham Lincoln observed in 1837 that politicians were thought of as “a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men.”16 Early in the past century, politics was wittily defined as “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”17 This pejorative connotation has gained the upper hand in common parlance today and will likely persist as long as the pursuit of individual power, narrow partisan interests, and wealth dominate the political process. Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), a Prussian military strategist and historian, once defined war as politics carried out by other means. In today’s marketoriented society, politics is too often understood, and too often practiced, as private business carried out by other means. Thus politics is understood to pertain to the clash of private interests, rather than to the development of public interests. Despite common usage, we may nonetheless maintain that politics is effectively diminished whenever action, even if engaged by a group of individuals after much public debate, is oriented not to public concerns but to private interests. The definition of politics as the public pursuit of the public good is grounded in an assumption about the individuality of political actors. Those who speak and act in pursuit of the public good must retain their basic autonomy. That is to say, political speech and action is always the speech and action of distinct individuals. These individuals speak and act (or pretend to do so) with the public interest in mind. But they do so from distinct perspectives. A public that ceases to be a community of individuals ceases to be a public. It becomes instead a mass or mob. Political life is not herd life—that is what makes humans different from other social animals. Collective action that wholly eclipses the expressions and concerns of individuals is no longer truly political action. Now, let us get back to the problem posed earlier in this chapter. How do we decide whether a legislative session is more political than a classroom debate or a basketball game? By the criteria accepted here, we would have to say that the more political event is that which proved more open to the influence of the public (either directly, through elected representatives, or through compliance) as well as more concerned with matters pertaining to the public at large. In most cases, legislative sessions would come out on top. Yet politics does not happen only in city halls and state capitols, and we should not restrict our understanding of political life to the selection of government officials or the influencing of governmental decisions. Campaigning, lobbying, voting, passing bills, and making laws predominate in our common understanding of politics, and many
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political scientists limit their understanding of politics to such activities.18 Nevertheless, politics is about a great deal more. The politics of classroom debate, for example, is real enough, and need not be insignificant. A classroom debate in political theory that affects the way its participants carry out their lives outside the classroom is certainly of political import. Indeed, the debates that Socrates carried out with his students were considered of great political significance by his fellow Athenians—so much so as to warrant a criminal prosecution. Certainly moral and political discussion always bears the potential of affecting public life. Even the study of seemingly nonpolitical topics, such as evolutionary biology or genetics, may be considered political if it alters the mores that structure collective existence. In short, anything that affects the way people understand and order their public lives is political to some degree. Bernard Crick writes that “the attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics. When everything is seen as relevant to politics, then politics has in fact become totalitarian. . . . To ensure that there be politics at all, there must be some things at least which are irrelevant to politics.”19 Politics cannot and should not embrace everything. Yet Crick acknowledges that “nothing can be exempted from politics entirely” and that what can be considered political “is wider than is sometimes supposed.”20 Our understanding of politics should not cast a net so broadly as to leave nothing behind, nor so narrowly as to bypass entire segments of the political world. The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) had an expansive understanding of politics in mind when he asked: “Is not science itself ‘political activity’ and political thought, in as much as it transforms men, and makes them different from what they were before?” At the same time, Gramsci is cautious. Because politics can be found everywhere it becomes necessary to make distinctions between different levels or degrees of political activity. In the absence of such distinctions, Gramsci observes, our discussions would lapse “into a wearisome and tautological catalogue of platitudes.”21 Hard-and-fast definitions of politics have their place, but it is in the finer distinctions that political theory makes its mark. Navigating the extensive yet uneven terrain of political life entails the exercise of discerning theoretical judgment. Suggested Readings Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition Aristotle. Politics Michael Bakunin. Bakunin on Anarchism Bernard Crick. In Defense of Politics
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Robert Dahl. Democracy and Its Critics Antonio Gramsci. Selections from the Prison Notebooks Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers Friedrich Hayek. The Road to Serfdom G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan John Locke. Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration Steven Lukes. Power: A Radical View Niccolò Machiavelli. The Prince and Discourses Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America
chapter 4
Modernity and Postmodernity CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY is anything but predictable: its objects of study are multiple, its methods are varied, and its orientations are manifold. Within the tradition of political theory, many distinct and opposing conceptual, methodological and ideological “camps” vie for position. Such divisions are inevitable among creative thinkers. They prove fertile grounds for theorizing, though too often they stifle original thought behind false dichotomies and rigid barriers. One of the most fertile and troubling distinctions today is that between modern and postmodern theory. In this chapter we investigate the division between the modern and the postmodern and explore the benefits of crossing borders. Modernity arose out of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution, events of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries that marked a radical transformation of the artistic and literary world, the religious world, and the world of inquiry and knowledge respectively. These three events intermingled to produce a widespread and thorough challenge to tradition and authority. They marked a vibrant assertion of the growing power of the human mind. The word modern refers to that which is recently in existence. A modernist is someone who prefers the new-fashioned to the old-fashioned. The term modernist was first used with this connotation in the sixteenth century. It referred, often pejoratively, to someone who spurned tradition and advocated either new techniques of scientific inquiry or the study and use of vernacular or contemporary languages rather than classical Greek or Latin. Modernism stood in contrast to traditionalism, which indicated a tendency to adhere to methods of inquiry, orientations, and languages that had been handed down from ancient and medieval times. The term modernist may never actually have been used in his own day to describe the Italian astronomer, mathematician, and physicist Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Nonetheless, we may view this key figure of the Scientific Revolution as embodying the central features of modernism. Galileo abandoned traditional authorities and standards of inquiry. He took exception to Aristotle,
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who until that time had stood as the chief authority in matters of science no less than in matters of philosophy. Against Aristotle, for instance, Galileo insisted that bodies do not fall with velocities proportional to their weights. Were it not for the effects of (air) friction, heavy objects would fall at the same speed as light ones. Galileo also rejected the Ptolemaic understanding of the earth as the center of the solar system. He embraced instead the theory of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) that the earth revolved around the sun. Copernicus had developed his heliocentric theory on the basis of an extensive reexamination of ancient astronomical charts. Though eventually banned, this thesis was initially unopposed by the Catholic Church, perhaps because it was a highly theoretical piece of work that did not seem likely to gain widespread support. Galileo, however, made the “Copernican revolution” come to life. In 1632 he published a defense of the heliocentric theory based on hard empirical evidence, namely, the numerous observations he had made through a device of his own construction, the astronomical telescope. In 1633, Galileo was brought to Rome and forced to renounce the theory that the earth revolved around the sun, which was thought to contradict the teachings of Catholicism. The church’s effort to make Galileo recant his belief might be seen as the first, and most infamous, attempt by the forces of tradition to stifle the nascent forces of modernism. While the traditionalists won the battle—Galileo regretfully recanted—they would lose the war. The tide of modernism proved unstoppable. Modernism largely developed in the Western world owing to the growing power of science. This was a new, empirical science, no longer grounded in the metaphysical musings of ancient authorities or in religious creed. “I think in the discussion of natural problems,” Galileo wrote, “we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.” From this point on, nothing was to be taken for granted or accepted on the basis of faith or authority. Everything was to be validated through reason and grounded in repeated observations and experimental investigations of the concrete, physical world. As Albert Einstein wrote, the leitmotif of Galileo’s work was “the passionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authority.”1 In the wake of this fight, modern science was born. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), an English philosopher contemporary with Galileo, stated that “ancient times were the youth of the world.” Bacon believed that there was much growing up to be done. He wrote the Novum Organum, or New Logic. This work was meant to supersede the old logic developed by Aristotle, who had composed a work called the Organum. Bacon’s new logic was also meant to supersede the metaphysical speculation that developed within the medieval theological philosophy of scholasticism. Scholasticism aimed to complement and strengthen faith in the Christian God with a good dose of Aristotelian logic. In proposing a new form of logic to guide inquiry, Bacon
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challenged both the authority of Aristotle and the relevance of religious faith. Bacon’s new logic was based on induction, the process of reasoning from the particular to the general, from particular observations of the natural world, for instance, to the general laws to which nature conforms. It stood in contrast to the ancient logical methods, which were mostly based on deduction. Deduction is argument that proceeds from the general to the particular, from cosmological principles, for example, to particular moral imperatives. Voltaire (1694–1778), a French philosopher and man of letters, spoke for many in calling Francis Bacon the “father of experimental philosophy.”2 Indeed, Bacon’s work on induction was particularly well suited to the emerging empirical sciences. Rather than start from a general principle, which was often theologically grounded and based on the idealistic, metaphysical speculations of ancient authorities, Bacon suggested starting with numerous concrete observations of the real world. These observations would allow the scientist to discern patterns or regularities in the workings of nature. On the basis of these observed regularities, the scientist could then form hypotheses and theories that described the general laws of nature. These natural laws were held to function in strict accord with logic. The scientists’ theories, moreover, were designed to be objectively verifiable. They could be tested and refined by repeated observation and experimentation. To understand the natural world, one no longer required religious revelation. Science was enough. Nature can be commanded, Bacon wrote, only by obeying her laws. Learning nature’s laws was the first step to mastering her. Mastering nature became a central goal for the modernists. The heliocentric movement of the planets was discovered by Copernicus, empirically validated by Galileo, theoretically refined by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), who calculated the mathematics of planetary motion, and effectively explained by Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who outlined the role of the universal force of gravity. The Scientific Revolution inaugurated by these men not only yielded astronomical insight. It also demonstrated that the laws of physics applied to the earth. Beginning with the work of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), the world came to be understood quite differently from what was believed in ancient times. It was proposed to operate solely by means of mechanical forces that acted causally on material objects. These forces could be rationally deduced, empirically measured, and expressed in mathematical terms. Gods, theologists, and metaphysical philosophers had little to say or do in this modern world. The book of nature was written in the language of mathematics, Galileo said, and scientists had taken over the task of reading it. Modernism was grounded in the assumption that the order of the universe is natural, accessible to reason and observation, and describable in impersonal, materialistic, mechanical, and mathematical terms. Francis Bacon famously maintained that “knowledge itself is power,” meaning that he who understands nature can control her. For the past four centuries, modernism has flourished in
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the wake of the power accumulated through scientific knowledge and technical engineering. With this in mind, we might say that the first characteristic of modernity is scientism—a belief in the preeminent power and prerogatives of science. The modern celebration of science actually found its roots in scholasticism. The scholastics relied on Aristotle, who, unlike Plato, attempted to combine rational inquiry with empirical investigation of the natural world. Modernists were receptive to the empirical orientation of Aristotle. Scholastics took Aristotle as an authority, however, and were preoccupied with logical, deductive argument and its relationship to religious faith. Modernists rejected ancient authority and advocated a humanistic orientation that was opposed to the theocentric or God-centered orientation of the scholastics. This “secular” humanism was a legacy of the Renaissance, a period that broadly marks the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. The Renaissance, which literally means “rebirth,” began in the fourteenth century as a rediscovery of the humanistic orientation of the Greeks and Romans. These ancient people were greatly admired for their celebration of human beauty, intelligence, and individual greatness. In its modern form, humanism became increasingly individualistic, valuing the power of the human mind and will and the autonomy of the individual above all. These values stood in marked contrast to the traditionalism and humility advocated by the medieval church, which roundly condemned the sinfulness of human pride and was suspicious of human ingenuity. The Renaissance reached its peak in Galileo’s and Bacon’s time. By then the privileged throne of humankind at the center of God’s creation, like the privileged position of the earth at the center of the solar system, was crumbling. Yet humanism could maintain its celebration of human values and the human spirit because it sought to unlock the secrets of the universe through human reason and ingenuity. Humankind was also gaining the power to control more and more of its world through science and the development of technology. At this time America had recently been “discovered” by Europeans, the globe was being circumnavigated, and the human mind, it was assumed, was beginning to exercise its full potential. This age was unique, the famous French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) reflected, in achieving both the “discovery of the world” and the “discovery of man.” The second central characteristic of modernity, then, is its humanism. Modernists celebrate humanity as the master of its world. This brings us to the final key characteristic of modernity. In addition to its scientism and humanism, modernity was characterized by progressivism. To be progressivist is to believe that the world is constantly changing for the better. Modernists assume that such steady improvement can be sustained owing to the continual advances made though the power of the human mind. Minimally, modernists believe that there will always be progress in the accumulation of
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knowledge and in the capacity to better our material conditions through technology. As Descartes writes, if humankind puts its “long chains of reasoning” to work in a methodical, empirical fashion, “there can be nothing so remote that we cannot reach to it, nor so recondite that we cannot discover it.” In this way, Descartes hoped, we could “render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.”3 Particularly during the Enlightenment, which was at its height in Europe during the eighteenth century, the progressivist celebration of reason took a new turn. Rational capacities were increasingly applied not only to the conquest of the natural world but also to the control of the social and political world. The attempt was made to duplicate in culture the mastery increasingly achieved over nature. Modernists suggested that humanity’s moral stature and political organization, not simply its material condition, was undergoing or could undergo constant improvement. Such progressivism was given dramatic voice in the work of the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94), a French philosopher who wrote a work entitled Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Condorcet traced the development of humanity through nine epochs and predicted a tenth in which the “indefinite” perfectibility of the human race would become irreversible. Most modernists do not share Condorcet’s utopian belief in humanity’s imminent moral and intellectual perfection, but they share in the belief that humanity can steadily progress in its overall development. Like Condorcet, they attribute this potential for progress to the character of the human mind and will. In this respect, modernity effectively exchanged scholasticism’s faith in God for a faith in humanity. Its progressivism is grounded in the belief that rational and scientific inquiry, irreversible moral development, and the ever-increasing power of technology will steadily improve the lot of humankind. Individualist Theories of Politics Our definitions and conceptualizations of politics and power in the previous chapter proved quite useful, allowing us not only to speak about the nature of politics but also about the different degrees to which particular activities or affairs can be considered political. The working definition of politics that we employed—an exercise of power that influences people to pursue particular objectives or adopt particular norms that direct or order their collective lives— is held by many contemporary political theorists and political scientists. Its key characteristic is its individualist orientation. This orientation is a legacy of modernism. The standard understanding of politics is individualistic because it takes the individual to be the key unit of analysis. The individual both exercises power and is the object of power’s exercise. Typically, the individual is assumed to be engaged in voluntary and rational acts that serve its own interests. As either the
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wielder or the object of power, the individual is assumed to be an independent actor and an autonomous moral agent. The manner in which this relatively sovereign and atomic individual interacts or should interact with other individuals, and how the political community comes to form and develop as a result of these interactions, become the foci of study for modern political theorists and scientists. The individualist understanding of power is generally directed to three central concerns: (1) the nature and degree of power held by particular individuals (e.g., studies of presidents, prime ministers, legislators, or other political elites); (2) the nature of the political processes and institutions that distribute and manage the power held by individuals (e.g., studies of elections or of the various branches of government); and (3) the moral and rational standards that the individual ought to apply to the exercise of power or its resistance (e.g., studies of civil rights and duties, the nature of justice and liberty, and other concerns of normative political theory). The common feature of these otherwise distinct fields of investigation is that each focuses on individual actors as the autonomous wielders or resisters of power. Collective political existence, in turn, is viewed as the aggregated sum of the distinct actions taken by individuals. This individualist orientation is clearly evident in Hobbes. Hobbesian individuals willfully exercise power on each other to serve their interests in the state of nature. Owing to a common interest in security, they decide to give up their weapons and rights to a Leviathan, who then rules absolutely. Whether in an anarchical state of nature or in a society ruled by a despot, Hobbesian individuals intentionally wield power (in lesser or greater degree) as wholly autonomous agents. Of course, the result of individualist theorizing need not be a Hobbesian form of politics. Many if not most liberals accept the tenets of individualism. Yet the liberal tradition—from the English philosopher John Locke (1632– 1704) through contemporary champions of individual rights and freedoms— has taken a strong stand against the political absolutism promoted by Hobbes. As the work of many contemporary liberal theorists demonstrates, the perspective of the autonomous individual may be used to promote a democratic politics grounded in constitutionalism, limited government, and inalienable civil liberties. One of the more widely accepted individualist definitions of politics forms the title of Harold Lasswell’s classic book, Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How.4 Politics is about the power to decide who gets his interests served, according to what processes, and on whose timetable. It is about the struggle of individuals to secure their particular needs or wants. Lasswell is primarily concerned with the allocation of scarce resources because conflict over their pursuit is understood to be inevitable. Hence the governmental regulation of social interaction is also inevitable, lest violence and injustice rule the day. For Lasswell,
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politics is about the use of governmental power to regulate social interaction and allocate scarce resources. This understanding of politics is common among those who view power primarily in individualist terms. This modern definition of politics has proven very useful for political theorists and scientists, allowing them to chart the exercise of power and argue for its appropriate limits. It often fosters elegant theorizing. Yet, like all theoretical perspectives, it is a limited view. Politics is not only about how individual needs become satisfied in a world of scarce resources. Politics also plays a role in determining how these needs are created in the first place, how they become articulated, and what sort of relationships form around them. Politics comes into play in the way we are influenced to perceive our particular needs as needs and in the way we are influenced to perceive our particular rights (to see these needs fulfilled) as rights. Politics precedes and exceeds the distribution of scarce resources and the pursuit of individual interests because it concerns the ways we define and understand our resources, our interests, our relationships, and ultimately ourselves as individuals. A central assumption of individualists is that the autonomous agent is, as it were, prepolitical. For liberals who accept this premise, individuals make politics, politics does not make individuals. Communitarian theorists disagree. As Michael Sandel writes: “By putting the self beyond the reach of politics, [liberalism] makes human agency an article of faith rather than an object of continuing attention and concern, a premise of politics rather than its precarious achievement.”5 Communitarian theorists argue that liberals ignore the way political communities shape the attitudes, values, and behavior of their members. The proper cultivation of these attitudes, values, and behavior, communitarians insist, is required to sustain social life and political society. Communitarians believe that social order is currently being undermined owing to an uncritical celebration of individual autonomy. At least, this is the case in certain societies according to sociologist Amitai Etzioni. Etzioni argues that liberals who champion individual autonomy tend to present their principles as ahistorical truths. Yet the need for either increased social order or increased individual autonomy in any given society depends on the historical and cultural circumstances. While contemporary China may be better served by an increase in individual autonomy, Etzioni states, contemporary America is in need of greater social order. Heightening social order, Etzioni points out, does not necessitate increased levels of (state) coercion. Indeed, to the extent that social order is achieved through moral education and an appeal to common values, coercive means become less, not more, necessary in a communitarian state.6 Politics, for communitarians, is not simply the Lasswellian process of divvying up the collective pie. Politics also entails an ongoing debate and struggle over the way we become identified and identify ourselves as pie makers, pie cutters, and pie eaters. Communitarian political philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues
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that to answer the question “What ought I to do?” one must first answer the question “Who am I?”7 What one wants and what one does is largely a product of who one understands oneself to be. Politics, it follows, is not only a question of doing what you do to get what you want but also a question of being and becoming who you are. Politics is not only a question of actions that serve particular interests but also a question of identities. Postmodern theorists share with communitarians this concern with identity. However, communitarians tend to focus on reinvigorating traditional means of cultivating moral identities. They generally advocate the strengthening of the family, the intervention of the state in fostering cultural and ethical life, and the need for increased social order. The key political question for postmodern theorists, as we shall see in subsequent sections, concerns the contestation of identities derived from social and political institutions. Postmodernists, in particular, investigate how identity formation occurs in relation to and by excluding difference. Like communitarians, postmodern theorists insist that liberals mistakenly assume that individuals are autonomous agents separated from the social whole. However, postmodern theorists criticize communitarians for assuming that individuals are or should be largely fused into a well-ordered social whole.8 This fusion of identities, postmodernists worry, excludes difference and undermines diversity. To speak of identity in the abstract is problematic. People do not have abstract identities. They have particular identities that bear particular features. They are sons or daughters, mothers or fathers, students or teachers, artists, bankers, or football players. Identities, moreover, are not one-dimensional, monolithic, or unchanging. They are multilayered, complex, and subject to development over time. Finally, identities are always relational. That is to say, identities necessarily coexist with difference, in the sense that we can “identify” ourselves only by way of differentiating ourselves from something or someone else. If our identities are extremely unified and closed, it is likely that this rigid rendering of our selves is achieved by maintaining an equally one-dimensional understanding of others. From a political perspective, then, the interesting point is not simply that we all have identities. What is significant is that we are all constantly involved in negotiating which parts of our identities will be privileged and accentuated, which parts will be suppressed or ignored, how our identities will be transformed, and what sort of relationship our identities will form with difference. Politics always pertains to two (related) questions. The first question is: What power does the individual exercise on other individuals in its social environment to achieve its interests? This is the modernist concern. The second question is: What power does the social environment exercise on individuals to construct their identities? This is the postmodernist concern. Both sorts of questions are worth asking. Indeed, they are probably most fruitful when asked together.
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The modern orientation assumes that the individual willfully exercises power as an independent agent with an unchanging nature and relatively stable, enduring, and freely chosen interests. The postmodern orientation assumes that individual and collective identities are formed over time within a social context and that individual and collective interests are largely derived from these identities. In this latter case, power is exercised not wholly or even primarily by individuals on their social environment, but by the social environment as a whole, or by some subsection of it, on individuals. Structuralist Theories of Politics One might think of the power of the social environment as related to, but broader than, the power of custom or tradition. The concern here is not simply with the power of an individual who utilizes tradition or customary practices to achieve particular goals. Instead, the concern is with the power exerted by the social environment itself, by the panoply of its traditions, customs, practices, and institutions as a whole. These traditions, customs, practices, and institutions are collectively known as social structures. Social structures influence the way we understand ourselves and our world, but they remain without specific authors and agents. Those who concern themselves with the power of social structures— in contrast to those individualist theorists who emphasize the power of human agency—are known as structuralists. Structuralists paved the way for postmodern theorists. Those who reject structuralism and adopt the modern, individualist orientation are often known as methodological individualists. For methodological individualists, the whole is defined by adding up its parts. Their methodology for analyzing political life is based on the assumption that society may be explained by aggregating the actions and relationships of individuals. A key characteristic of structuralism, in contrast, is the belief that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A central tenet of structuralism is that society is more than an aggregate of individuals. Social structures have features that are not reducible to the sum of similar features held singly by their constituents or participants. But how can a collectivity gain a quality that is absent in the individuals who make it up? How can society have a life of its own, so to speak, apart from the various comings and goings of the individuals that compose it? Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), a French sociologist, believed that society did indeed have a life of its own. His work inaugurated the structuralist perspective. Durkheim explained the nature of society by way of the following biological metaphor: The living cell contains nothing but mineral particles, as society contains nothing but individuals; and yet it is patently impossible for the phenomena characteristic of life to reside in the atoms of hydrogen,
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oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. . . . Let us apply this principle to sociology. If, as we may say, this synthesis sui generis which every society constitutes, yields new phenomena, differing from those which take place in individual minds, we must, indeed, admit that these facts reside in the very society itself which produces them, and not in its parts, i.e., its members.9 In one bowl, we have a fish swimming in water. In another bowl, we have a small pile of minerals, other elements and bubbles suspended in water, the same types and amounts of minerals, other elements and gases as are contained in the first bowl. It is obvious in this case that the whole (the live fish) is indeed greater— not only more complex but qualitatively different—than the sum of its parts (a few grams of minerals, other elements and gases). Gathering together an assortment of molecules, even if they are combined in precisely the right quantities, will not produce a living creature. The living creature has behaviors and capacities, such as reproduction, that exceed what its constituent molecules are capable of on their own or in aggregate form. Yet, from the methodological individualist perspective, a living organism is simply a particular arrangement of individual molecules. Applying this understanding to the study of society, Durkheim argues that social structures far exceed in power and scope the aggregated activities of the individual members that compose them. Social structures largely determine how individual members of a society behave and interact. They do so just as the physical constitution of a fish or any other living organism largely determines how the tissues and organs that compose it will interact. We may assert that society is made up of individuals, Durkheim argues, only because the individual is first made by society. “Society does not find the bases on which it rests fully laid out in consciences; it puts them there itself,” Durkheim insists. He goes on to state that “although society may be nothing without individuals, each of them is much more a product of society than he is its maker.”10 Social structures produce the observable regularities of the social world. These regularities are rigid in the sense that most individuals cannot alter them even though they are affected by them. As individuals, we cannot appreciably alter the rate of employment, income curves, matrimonial laws, levels of access to education, and hierarchies organized around class, race, gender, age, power, wealth, and prestige. Yet as individuals we are affected by these structures. They influence our behavior and contribute to our identities. Durkheim suggested that the way people think in primitive societies mimics the social order of their society. Individual cognitive systems and mental schemata are patterned upon the existing social structure of the group. This understanding has been extended to contemporary societies by Pierre Bourdieu, a renowned French sociologist, who argues that individuals internalize as “men-
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tal dispositions” and “schemes of perception and thought” the organization of their external reality. The word Bourdieu uses for these dispositions and schemes is habitus. Habitus is a matrix of internalized cultural orientations, skills, and practices. Bourdieu uses the word field to describe a network of social arrangements that embody and distribute positions and relations of power. The mental structures composing one’s habitus, then, are reflections of the social structures composing the fields in which one participates. Habitus is an internalization of social fields, much as the soccer player’s repertoire of behavior is a reflection of the constraints (rules and boundary markers) of the soccer field. Unlike the rules for the game of soccer, however, the rules of social fields are seldom explicit or codified. They are learned, mostly without effort or intent, simply by living in a complex network of social relations. In this sense, social fields or social structures are analogous to the human unconscious. There is only indirect evidence for their existence. They are known primarily by their effects, that is to say, by the way that they pattern behavior. Social structures may be thought of as particular arrangements of social relations that elicit certain other relations or actions from social members. Following Durkheim, Bourdieu insists that these structural configurations are sui generis, that is to say, they are unique entities unto themselves. They are not simply the aggregate sum of individual actions and thus “cannot be reduced to the interactions and practices through which they express themselves.”11 Despite their influence, social structures often remain undetected by those they affect. They constrain the relations of individuals without those individuals necessarily becoming aware of them. Like those who cannot see the forest for the trees, individuals in society do not generally notice the structures that affect their behavior. They fail to perceive these structures because they are focused on the behavior of other individuals like themselves. Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French structural anthropologist, held that the myths that ground social life do not find their ultimate origins in the creative efforts of individual authors. Myths reflect the structure of the collective human mind. Human beings necessarily think and communicate in certain ways, according to set mental patterns, such as binary oppositions or dichotomies. Totemic and kinship systems also evidence these structured patterns, which reproduce themselves and their effects in all cultures at all times.12 For Lévi-Strauss, cultural institutions are the external projections and manifestations of universal structures, just as sentences are external manifestations of general grammatical rules. While individuals may create innumerable “original” sentences, they can do so intelligibly only by following rather strict grammatical rules about the way certain kinds of words and phrases can be combined. Likewise, while individuals may create various cultural arrangements, they can do so, Lévi-Strauss suggests, only by following strict yet unwritten rules that dictate how the phenomena of cultural life are structured.
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This line of thinking may be traced back to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who argued that the human mind has innate faculties that organize its perceptions of the world according to certain “rational” constraints and categories. Without these faculties, which determine the “mode of our knowledge of objects” and maintain the stable categories of space and time, experience would be reduced to haphazard and largely incommunicable sensations.13 Structural Marxists, such as Louis Althusser, likewise hold that individuals are epistemologically and behaviorally molded according to deep patterns that transcend culture and time.14 For structural Marxists, these patterns are neither set in the collective mind, as Lévi-Strauss proposed, nor in innate mental categories, as Kant proposed. Instead, they are found in concrete economic relations that undergo logical and predictable patterns of transformation. These patterns depend on the level of a society’s technological development. For structural Marxists, individual agents bear a resemblance to puppets on strings. The strings are being pulled by historical economic forces, forces largely beyond any individual’s control. For the most part, these strings remain invisible to the individual agents themselves. It takes the demystifying work of theorists to make these strings apparent. Structural Marxists tend to deny the importance of human individuality, volition, and freedom. Other structuralists, such as Durkheim, Bourdieu, LéviStrauss, and the sociologist Anthony Giddens, do not take such a hard line. They propose a more balanced tension between the social structures that constrain us and the freedom we demonstrate as individuals. Individuality, for Durkheim, is a valued product of modern times. Greater individuality and greater freedom, Durkheim argues, arise with the division of labor and the development of larger, more complex societies that allow individuals to escape the constraints of both instinct and convention. Lévi-Strauss similarly points out that the true value of liberty only arises once we understand that liberty itself is a cultural creation.15 Giddens insists that structures are involved in the generation of our daily practices but that these practices, taken together, also generate and maintain social structures. His theory of “structuration” suggests that social structures are both the “medium and result” of human practices.16 Human agency continues to play an important role. Bourdieu similarly argues that habitus, though a reflection of social structures, is also creative and subject to change. Though “durable,” it is “not eternal.”17 Individuals may transgress, redefine, invent, and improvise within the boundaries of their field. Indeed, this is all part of the game. As a structuralist, however, Bourdieu maintains that these redefinitions, transgressions, inventions, and improvisations are neither limitless nor completely free-floating. They are themselves conditioned by the rewards and sanctions typically meted out in social fields. Durkheim, Bourdieu, Lévi-Strauss, and Giddens insist that individuality and freedom arise only through human interaction, and human interaction only ever occurs
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within social structures that constrain, channel, and enable behavior. The greatest freedom arises when we become aware of the structures that both constrain us and make our actions viable and intelligible. Only by understanding the power of our social environment do we become better equipped to reform it. From the 1940s until well into the 1970s, the social sciences were animated by debates between social structuralists and methodological individualists. For the most part, and particularly in America, the methodological individualists gained the upper hand. Liberal political theory today remains closely aligned with methodological individualism. Debates about the relative importance of social structure and human agency persist, though in a somewhat abated form. In all likelihood the debate will never be resolved in favor of one side or the other. The question as to how social and political life is best understood and explained—by way of the social structures that mold individual behavior or by way of the aggregated individual behavior that constitutes social life—has never been satisfactorily answered. The question will likely perturb us for the indefinite future, notwithstanding a growing consensus that our lives combine both processes. Poststructural and Postmodern Theories of Politics Beginning in the late 1960s, structuralism itself underwent a challenge from an upstart movement that came to be known as poststructuralism. Poststructuralists reject the idea that social structures are invariant or evolve according to fixed cultural or historical patterns. Unlike methodological individualists and like structuralists, poststructuralists maintain that power is not always or even primarily a tool willfully employed by the individual actor in pursuit of freely chosen interests. The social environment is assumed to play a larger role. Unlike structuralists, however, poststructuralists do not view power as emanating solely from stable institutions such as kinship systems, mental faculties, or economic classes. They see power as widely dispersed within the social whole and constantly in flux. Poststructuralists have been reluctant to construct grand theories. Unlike structuralists, they do not believe that powerful institutions or traditions transform social life across time and space according to a singular, identifiable logic. Instead, they investigate how particular forms of power achieve particular effects within particular historical periods, cultures, or texts. Poststructuralists reject the notion that there are ahistorical, cross-cultural categories of experience or structures of social existence. Spurning the structuralist mandate of discovering and scientifically defining these categories and structures, poststructuralists attempt to undermine our belief in them. Certain poststructuralists, such as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, engage in deconstruction. Like much of modern philosophy, deconstruction exhibits what philosopher Richard Rorty refers to as “the linguistic turn.” It
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focuses on language. The roots of deconstruction may be traced back to the Swiss structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Saussure’s theory of language held that meaning is not determined by the stable relation of words (signifiers) to concrete things or even to conceptual representations of these things (the signified). Meaning is determined by the intricate relation of words to other words. It is a structured play of signs. Deconstruction focuses on this unstable relativity of language. For Derrida, a text does not have an intrinsic meaning grounded in its accurate representation of reality. Rather, the meaning of a text is found in its differential relation to other texts. Deconstruction utilizes the rhetorical features of a text to undermine or cast suspicion on its manifest content or argument, particularly if the text asserts or legitimates stable categories of experience or structures of social existence. Deconstruction demonstrates that any attempt to conceptualize neatly these categories or structures harbors self-contradictory linguistic tendencies. It also demonstrates that certain rhetorical forms, such as binary oppositions between subject and object, appearance and reality, mind and body, male and female, self and other, speech and writing insidiously establish hierarchies of values.18 Deconstructionists attempt to disrupt the strategies of exclusion and inclusion that are generated by such binary oppositions. Deconstructionists assert that the world is a text, or rather a constellation of interwoven texts in the ongoing process of being written and rewritten. Thus deconstruction is concerned not only or even primarily with the capacity of language to represent reality. It focuses on the capacity of language to construct reality. Likewise, poststructuralist theory is not only or even primarily concerned with the capacity of power to constrain action and desire. It focuses on the capacity of power to construct identity, and by so doing, to induce action and desire. Identities become constructed within hierarchically organized categories of experience and social structures. Poststructuralists explore the forms of power involved in this construction of social reality. Poststructuralists investigate the generative effects of power. Hence many poststructuralists, such as the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–84), are not preoccupied with the linguistic forms and rhetorical contradictions found in texts. They investigate the concrete institutions and other historical legacies of power. By focusing on the contextual relativity of these institutions and legacies, poststructuralists seek to undermine the grip various forms of power have on us today. The poststructural concern for dispersed forms of social power also grounds the orientation of postmodern theorists. Postmodernism is the direct heir to poststructuralism. Effectively, postmodernism is the more encompassing cultural expression of the largely academic exercises of poststructuralists. Postmodernism refers to the widespread cultural sensibility, tendency, or mood that is loosely grounded in and serves as a grounding for poststructuralist theory.
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Postmodern theorists are far from a unified bunch. They have been usefully described as a “constellation” of thinkers, that is to say, a juxtaposed cluster of elements that resists reduction to a common core.19 The thinkers and writers commonly considered postmodernists—for example, Jean Baudrillard, William Connolly, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Frederic Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty—have all criticized certain tendencies of postmodernism and have denied that the term neatly applies to their own work.20 They approach the practical and theoretical world from varied perspectives and seldom see eye-to-eye among themselves. Nonetheless, like structuralists and unlike methodological individualists, postmodern theorists are primarily concerned with the social construction and contestation of identities. In turn, like structuralists and unlike methodological individualists, postmodern theorists do not so much celebrate the power of human agency as worry about its fragility. While acknowledging the power of government and economic classes, postmodernists caution us not to conclude that these are the only institutions that shape our lives. Unlike structuralists, postmodern theorists insist that our identities are the products of a panoply of protean social forces. In particular, postmodernists focus on the discourses (systematized collections of mores) that permeate society and generate social identities. Unlike structuralists, postmodernists insist that discourses and other social forces can only be investigated piecemeal, from the ground up. One must begin with individual practices, particular institutions, and singular events that are themselves the products of the sorts of power being investigated. In turn, one’s investigation must originate from one’s own particular standpoint, a standpoint that is also largely a product of social power. This leads postmodernists to adopt a perspectivist position. The philosophy of perspectivism was originally proposed by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the German philosopher commonly credited with blazing the trail for postmodernism. Nietzsche maintained that “objectivity” as traditionally conceived was a “nonsensical absurdity.” He denied that there was “knowledge in itself ” that did not bear the marks of the situated individuals who created it. Only interpretation from particular points of view exists. Nietzsche insists that “there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing.’”21 With this in mind, postmodernists do not attempt to uncover universal structures or patterns that operate according to a stable logic or scientific laws. They assume that their own identities, desires, and predilections are the products of social power and therefore acknowledge that their investigations will only reveal the effects of particular relations of power as they are theorized from a particular vantage point. Like many modern individualists, structuralists had hoped to develop a social science that would yield objective truth along the lines of the natural sciences. Postmodernists, in contrast, suggest that we can never achieve an objective,
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scientific overview of the social forces that shape us. The most we can hope for is a wide variety of limited accounts obtained from multiple perspectives. Perspectivism undermines any claim to absolute knowledge about the political world. It therefore leads to an ironic stance, that is to say, an engaged yet playful interaction with the world grounded in a skeptical disposition. The irony of postmodernists stands opposed to the self-assured, scientific aspirations of modernists. (We further explore the meaning of irony in chapter 7, where it is contrasted to ideology.) The three major features of postmodernism, then, are its focus on the social construction of identity, its perspectivist denial of (epistemological or ethical) foundations, and its ironic demeanor. Postmodernists challenge the very notion of a single, uniform human nature. What makes humans what they are, postmodernists claim, is not some metaphysical or even biological human essence, but a particular historical development, one that has been and remains grounded in social processes. As Richard Rorty states, the postmodern assumption is that “socialization, and thus historical circumstance, goes all the way down—that there is nothing ‘beneath’ socialization or prior to history which is definatory of the human.”22 Thus postmodernists do not assume the unchanging nature of the individual who willfully wields power in pursuit of chosen interests, as modern individualists do. Nor do postmodernists take for granted the unchanging nature of the social structures that shape individual human behavior, as structuralists do. Instead, postmodern theorists insist that human identities are continually being constructed and contested within protean social environments owing to the interactions of specific forms of power. In rejecting the notion that there is a stable essence that defines humanity, postmodernists are not saying (though sometimes their rhetoric belies them) that people can simply choose who or what they want to be. Identities are not just roles people whimsically choose to play, roles that can be exchanged or given up at will from one day to the next. Identities are complex patterns of norms and desires, modes of thinking and behaving, that are formed over time owing to the integration of individuals within dense social networks. The postmodern orientation to politics assumes that individual and collective identities are intricately constructed and not easily transformed. A person’s identity is formed in a social environment, or more accurately, in multiple social environments. We are members, participants, and subjects of various groups, associations, relationships, and organizations that shape our opinions, values, behavior, and self-understandings. Family and friends; places of study, work, and worship; clubs and teams; professional, philanthropic, political, religious, and ethnic affiliations; business associations and interest groups; film, television, print and electronic media; municipal, state, national, and international movements, organizations, and institutions—these are some of the networks of relations that define our social environment. Each of these networks is
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itself historically and culturally circumscribed. Our embeddedness in this diverse environment largely defines who we are by both constricting and enabling our experiences, influencing what we feel, believe, know, and do. For the postmodernist, even basic individual desire and will are less the trademarks of individual autonomy than the constructs of a social environment. Many political scientists who do not consider themselves postmodernists are also concerned with how attitudes are created and how particular forms of behavior are stimulated by the speeches and actions that make up the “drama of the state.” A common concern is how political leaders “with access to mass media . . . shape and even create ‘public opinion’ by naming the issues and crises about which people come to have opinions.”23 Arguing against the individualist view that people are independent agents that always act in accordance with their preexisting beliefs and values, one student of political behavior writes: The common assumption that what democratic government does is somehow always a response to the moral codes, desires and knowledge embedded inside people is as inverted as it is reassuring. This model, avidly taught and ritualistically repeated, cannot explain what happens; but it may persist in our folklore because it so effectively sanctifies prevailing policies and permits us to avoid worrying about them.24 Here the concern is how economic and political elites shape political agendas and public opinion, effectively embedding moral codes, desires and knowledge in citizens rather than responding to them. In like fashion, many political scientists concern themselves with the “continued, insistent, and ubiquitous process” of communication and intimidation through which elites “win minds” and establish in the public a predilection for “order, obedience, the status quo, deference, political docility, and inequalities of income and wealth.”25 Notwithstanding the economic concessions made over the past centuries that have resulted in the improved welfare of the masses, many students of political behavior are concerned with how elites continue to manipulate political agendas, control the media, and exercise a preponderance of power. This power is systematically employed to form and shape the opinions, attitudes, and values of the public, making it more receptive to elite domination. These investigations of elite power follow the lead of the Italian neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who was concerned with the “hegemony” enjoyed by the political class controlling the state apparatus.26 Gramsci formulated his theory to account for specific historical developments, namely, the longevity and increasing strength of capitalism in the twentieth century. Its unabated growth contradicted orthodox Marxist theory (particularly as elaborated by the Second International), which predicted proletarian revolution and the quick demise of capitalism. Gramsci attempted to explain the anomaly. He focused on how the
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dominant class used political and cultural tools to manipulate the other strata of society into accepting, and even endorsing, unjust and exploitative social relations. While orthodox Marxism often spoke with the voice of economic determinism, Gramsci pointed to the power of elites and elite institutions to postpone social revolution indefinitely. Postmodernists have many of the same concerns as Gramsci and contemporary theorists of political behavior. But postmodernists are not concerned solely, or even primarily, with how powerful elites shape people’s opinions, attitudes, and values. Postmodernists are concerned with how entire identities are constructed, and how certain opinions, attitudes, and values follow therefrom. As a specialist on the media writes, “The best way to control and manipulate an individual is not to tell them what to do; that always generates resistance, hostility and defiance. Instead, tell a person who and what they are. They will end up eating our of your hand.”27 Postmodernists investigate how people become who and what they are. While not denying the power of elites to manipulate the public, postmodernists tend to focus on more ambiguous forces—modes of discourse and other systems of mores—that shape identities within the social environment. Modernist theorists of political culture maintain that people process their experiences into opinions, attitudes, values, and action through predispositions that are products of socialization.28 Postmodernists share this concern. At the same time, postmodernists insist that the process of socialization goes deeper than modernist theorists of political culture and behavior would be willing to admit. For the postmodern theorist, the world itself is the product of the symbols, gestures, discourses, and dramas of social life. Postmodernists, in this regard, adopt a “constructivist” perspective. Reality itself, they suggest, is a social construct. While theorists of political behavior observe that people tend to ignore information until it is conveniently and perhaps misleadingly packaged for them by elites,29 postmodernists suggest that there are no independent “facts” or “data” about the world at all. Knowledge always comes prepackaged within its particular social context. In the next section, we will explore whether this postmodern perspective adequately grapples with the inequality in the exercise of power that is inherent to politics. Identity and the Exercise of Power The power to create and shape identities is unevenly exercised in society simply because some people (and organizations) are more powerful than others. Our lives are much influenced by the popular media of television, newspapers, and magazines, for example. By constitutional right, we all enjoy freedom of speech
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and freedom of the press. Yet only a small percentage of the population can afford to make effective use of the media to influence others. Freedom of the press, the saying goes, belongs to those who own it. The power to shape identities also belongs to those who supply the media with its advertising revenues. Despite our common use of the term, speech (and other means of shaping identities) is seldom free. With the development of the Internet, average citizens now have the virtually cost-free opportunity to communicate with diverse audiences. Exactly how the development of the Internet will affect political life remains to be seen. In many respects, the challenge for citizens is no longer gaining opportunities for dialogue or the dissemination of information. The challenge is to discover useful and meaningful speech amid a surplus of information (and entertainment). Given this surplus, considerable power continues to rest with those media organizations that command the resources necessary to package and deliver information to large audiences. Unequal distributions of political resources also yield varying capacities to create and shape identities. Until quite recently, this inequality of political power was institutionally entrenched. In ancient times, political power was mostly held by monarchs or aristocrats, who passed on the right of rule to their sons. With the rise of democracy, the opportunity to compete for political office became available to more people. In turn, the right to vote gave citizens a voice, albeit an indirect one, in the way laws and policies were crafted and hence in the way mores and identities came to be formed. While the United States is often celebrated as an exemplar of democratic politics, Americans’ participation in politics always has been and still is severely limited. Only about 160,000 people out of the nearly 4 million inhabitants of the American colonies voted for the delegates who ratified the 1790 constitution. That amounts to about 4 percent of the population. At the time, large numbers of people—women, Indians, and blacks—were explicitly excluded from political participation, while others (white men without property) were restricted in their manner of participation. Most restrictions on white male suffrage were lifted in the early 1800s. African Americans were not constitutionally enfranchised until 1870, women in 1920, and Native Americans in 1924. (Likewise, Britain has been considered a democracy since the end of the eighteenth century, though at that time only one adult in twenty had the right to vote.) Inequality in the exercise of political power occurs even when legislative restrictions to participation are few or nonexistent. “Water, water every where/Nor any drop to drink,” wrote Coleridge of the sea. One might say something similar about democracy in America. It ostensibly surrounds us. Yet for many there is very little of it to be tasted. Though the franchise legally extends to all adults, relatively few take full advantage of it, and even fewer have the knowledge, skills, and opportunity to make the best use of it. In the United
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States today, only 3 percent of citizens are politically active above and beyond the practice of voting. By way of comparison, something like 10 percent of the citizens of ancient Athens were politically active. Certainly something like democracy is enjoyed in the United States every few years, at election time. Even here, however, whether at municipal, state, or national levels, those participating often number less than half the eligible voters. Notably, some groups vote more than others. For example, a much greater proportion of people with high incomes vote than do people with low incomes. Perhaps the reason is that the limited choices available at the electoral table make for sparse pickings. Many people, particularly those with lower incomes, feel that their interests are not adequately represented by the available political candidates. Economic power and political power, it is widely understood, go hand in hand. This becomes a political problem whenever economic power is very unevenly distributed, as it is in the United States. The richest 1 percent of the population earns as much after-tax income as the bottom 38 percent. It also owns almost two-fifths of the nation’s wealth. The richest 10 percent of the population owns close to nine-tenths of the nation’s wealth. Over the past quarter century, moreover, wealth has become increasingly concentrated. Twenty-five years ago, the richest fifth of the population received four times the income of the poorest fifth. Today, the richest fifth of the population receives thirteen times the income of the poorest fifth. Indeed, income inequality in the United States is now greater than in any other industrialized country.30 The political ramifications of this trend are disturbing: the number of Americans who are politically inactive may grow. Poverty is not the only factor diminishing participation in politics. Many citizens, rich and poor, choose to avoid politics in order to focus on other pursuits. Others may simply be apathetic. In any case, with the partial exception of referendums that institute particular policies or laws, American citizens do not immediately engage in democratic self-government. They do not directly make decisions about how their collective lives will be governed. Instead, citizens periodically decide who will make these decisions for them. A representative system of government, effectively, is government by elites. Whether elite politics is good or bad, unavoidable or amenable to transformation, remains a topic of much debate. The fact that most forms of government constitute rule by elites is undeniable. Throughout history, elites—whether politicians, bureaucrats, business leaders, the clergy, the media, or officers of the armed forces—have played a preponderant role in wielding power. Recognizing this fact, certain social and political theorists have focused on the role of elites in politics and society. Some theorists, such as Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941) and Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923),
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accepted elite power as an unavoidable fact of life and came to defend it. But not all kinds of elite rule were advocated. Mosca and Pareto were concerned with the propensity of the ruling class to become hereditary. They advocated the “circulation of elites,” wherein merit rather than blood relations was the means to gaining elite status. The competition of elites for power would ensure that the social and political leadership remained vibrant. In the absence of an elite continually recharged with the most skilled and talented individuals, theorists worried, social order might collapse and with it the liberties it allowed. In the wake of totalitarian rule, Giovanni Sartori suggests, the major threat to democracy in the twentieth century was not an aristocracy or elite, as it certainly was in centuries past. Democratic rights and liberties were threatened, Sartori argues, because the masses were susceptible to demagogues, and demagogues are increasingly likely to gain power when the authority of traditional elites is undermined. Along with Mosca and Pareto, Sartori defends rule by elites as a necessary, if imperfect, means to secure desirable ends. Other theorists, such as C. Wright Mills, sharply oppose all forms of elitism despite its acknowledged tenacity.31 Evaluating the effects of elite power in the social construction of interests and identities is a demanding task. Evaluating means of effective resistance to specific forms of elite power is no less difficult. Postmodern theorists have often been criticized for inadequately taking on these tasks. Their preoccupation with abstract and ambiguous forms of social power, critics suggest, leave them blind to the concrete forms of power exercised—ruthlessly at times—by specific elites. In turn, critics charge that the perspectivism of postmodern theorists further undermines moral and political engagement. Postmodernists display great skill and insight exposing the contingencies of our current social and political practices. But perspectivism undermines their prerogative to suggest improvements (since the criteria for better and worse forms of collective order depend solely on one’s point of view). Irony, in turn, may keep postmodernists from taking seriously the need for social change—despite their claims that reality is a social construct. In this vein, certain environmental theorists worry that the postmodern notion of reality as a social construct may undermine needed efforts to protect the natural world. “If nature is only a social and discursive construction,” one critic of postmodernism rhetorically queries, “why fight hard to preserve it?”32 Voicing similar concerns, another critic suggests that postmodernism has become “an excuse not to believe in anything, to avoid both personal and political involvement and take refuge in apathy, despair, or mere ambition.”33 Contesting identity from multiple perspectives may be the privilege of relatively affluent intellectuals exercising their academic freedom. This suggests that postmodern theorists are taking full advantage of the economic accomplishments,
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political freedoms, and basic rights that are modernity’s crowning achievements. Is postmodernism, then, parasitic upon modernist values and victories that it explicitly rejects? Postmodernists have not been able to provide wholly reassuring responses to these charges. At the same time, their work displays insights that should not be dismissed out of hand. Michel Foucault has frequently been subject to the sorts of criticisms mentioned above. A brief look at Foucault’s efforts to theorize power allows us to investigate these charges while further illustrating the difference between postmodern theory and modern political science. In describing the nature of contemporary power, Foucault offers the image of a spider’s web without a spider. Because everyone is embedded in the social whole, everyone is caught in the web of power. Everyone becomes not only the object of power but its vehicle. Foucault writes that power is not so much “possessed” by elites as it is exercised in “capillary” form throughout society.34 Power is everywhere in play, creating the interests and identities of those among whom it circulates. This is not our intuitive understanding of power. It is difficult to imagine power as a spider’s web in the absence of an actual spider that constructed it and sits in control over it. We generally think of power as being exercised by a specific agent. Foucault suggests that the diff
